# 187

Dear Goran Marinkovic , Zoran Ilic, Žarko Nestorovic, Marko Božic and Vladimir Bulatovic

I read your article

Article Sensitivity of Multi-Criteria Analysis Methods in Rural Land Consolidation Project Ranking

Personal opinions on this subject o

It is obvious a subject of a great importance and very complex, and glad that the article sheds a light on it. I am alien to this subject, therefore, I read it with a great interest to learn. If I understood it rightly there are many small farms in many places, and I guess that it is convenient amalgamate or consolidate them, due to the advantages that it brings to the economy or a region.

It is not necessary to make a profound analysis when the advantages are evident regarding many factors like better use of farm machinery, better prices for glyphosate when bought in large quantities, as well as products as fertilizers and fungicides. However, I guess that consolidation is not mandatory in a region, and then probably there must be a government authority to deal with this issue and convince farmers of the convenience in work together with the same objective, consolidating their lands and be part of a body to manage them. The economies of scale can be a good reason to convince farmers to join efforts.

Now, from the point of view of MCDM in participating in this endeavour selecting which farms con solidate there are aspects that there could be really difficult to solve, for instance, different type of crops, different needs of water, different inputs, minimum and maximum size of each farm, same for the consolidated farm, distances between farms, negative of some farmers, etc.

I believe that in this situation MCDM should address the issue by forming clusters or individual farms within a catastral district.

I read this article and I did not find that these aspects were considered

My comments

1- In the abstract the authors say “Generally, there are two possible groups of methods: one based on a qualitative approach (DELPHI; SWOT) and one based on a quantitative approach (AHP, VIKOR, SAW, TOPSIS, etc.)”

This gives the impression that all of these methods can make the job. Not in my opinion.

DELPHI is a biased method that may be used to give the criteria weights, but not to decide about criteria, because that must be done as a consensus between the intervening farmers and stakeholders.

AHP is used to give weights of criteria just by intuition, and as that useless, and in other MCDM methods these ‘weights’ are used to selecting alternatives

2- Page 2 “The sensitivity of the methods was investigated using the differences in the obtained rankings between each method”

I understand that comparing rankings from different methods is not a guaranty to have an approximate ranking real to reality. Why? On what grounds? Even using correlation this is useless

Because we not have in any MCDM method, a yardstick representing reality and then, being able to make comparisons. Therefore, comparing or even computing the average of rankings is not acceptable because it does not give any useful information. I would like to know what is sensitivity of methods, never heard about that, perhaps you wanted to refer to sensitivity of the best alternative

3- Page 3 “it is not recommended to leave this to one person (regardless of their level of expertise), as they may make choices grounded in their own preferences”

Agreed in a100%, however, you use AHP that follows this procedure. A contradiction?

4- Page 3 “Bearing in mind that the decision maker might not be an expert in the MCDM method utilized, it is logical to assume that the decision making will be left to the mathematical algorithm on some level”

If the DM is not an expert in MCDM, then, he/she shouldn’t take part of the evaluation of alternative.

I disagree with the second part of your sentence since the mathematical algorithm does no decide anything. It only gives a mathematical solution based on data inputted, on that result the DM, farmers and experts may consider acceptable or not, based on experience, social, market and environmental conditions that the algorithm ignores, like legal aspects. They are the deciders not the algorithm. I hope that the mankind never will be governed by algorithms or AI

5- “ ….and that the most sensitive decision criterion is the one with the highest weight. This last point seems logical and intuitive, but it also implies that the hierarchy of weights defines the hierarchy of sensitivity”

Not really. The weight of a criterion is irrelevant to evaluate alternatives. It is a simple collection of trade-offs

The hierarchy of weights, something without any mathematical foundation, has nothing to do with sensitivity analysis (SA). What defines the importance of a criterion is the allowable rangeit has to vary without disturbing the ranking. As Chen,H. Kocaoglu, said, in the article you cited:

“Some studies in this group relevant to SA tried to identify the ranges in which the values in the AHP pairwise comparison matrix can vary without causing the rank reversal problem(Arbel and Vargas, 1990, Moreno-Jimenez and Vargas, 1993, Sugihara and Tanaka, 2001, Farkas et al., 2004)”., something impossible for AHP, because for that it would need to consider simultaneously all the criteria that define the best alternative, something that I can’t.

6- In page 8 you detail the 10 criteria considered, without a doubt relevant, but in my opinion incomplete. For instance,

- Where is considered the will of farmers to consolidate

- What happens when some farms have access to abundant water when in others this is scarce

- How do you take into account the different number, state and remaining life of equipment in each particular farm?

- How do you agree on what type of crops are to be cultivated

- How do you manage with different sizes of farms?

- How do you manage with existing personnel?

- How do you manage with each farmer debts and credits and times?

I believe the article is too partial on mathematics, and poor in real aspects; in other words too theoretical, but this is only my opinion

I hope my comments can help

Nolberto Munier