Dear Xu, Tianming Liu, Wei; Zhu, Zicheng

I read your paper:

Multi-criteria decision-making methods applied to achieve sustainable design: A systematic review

My comments

1- in the Abstract you say “environmentally sustainable design? “and “product sustainability problems”? What are they? Could you define both?

2- Page 4 “Literature review and survey was conducted to briefly rank the importance of each criterion and reduce their number by selecting the most important from them”.

In my opinion, it is not appropriate to use literature to weight your own criteria, since problems and situations are different

3- Page 4 “AHP provides a powerful means of making strategic and sound decisions”

Strategy is something alien to AHP, and how there could be sound decisions if they are based on intuition and feelings? If Saaty said that, he never explained on what basis he reached this assertion. He only suggested a procedure

“AHP also assists in making decisions that are characterized by several interrelated and often competing criteria,”

I wonder if you know that one of the cornerstones of AHP is that criteria must be independent, the opposite of what you say, and he was very clear about it. Maybe, because he understood that this independence rarely happens in real problems, compelled him to create ANP, where there is no restriction in this sense.

“This provides a structured and analytic, yet simple approach that does not require any special skills from the decision-makers to determine the best solution”

This is true. What could be easier that compare criteria by your feelings., that can change hours later?.

Is there lack of consistency in the DM judgments? Don’t worry, there is a table that says the DM what to do, and that don’t accept a negation for an answer. This is a good example of a machine instructing a human being!

Computing weights is done mathematically by the software using the Eigen Value Analysis. I wonder where is reasoning, research, investigation, consulting with colleagues, experimenting, etc.? They are inexistent, but according to you the procedure is sound?

4- On page 6 “Pareto method solve the problem when a set of design alternatives are needed’

Excellent. This is the best explanation I came across related to the role of Pareto Front in MCDM

5- On page 7 “The criteria size of the research was found to affect the selection of decision-making method. Different MCDM have apparently different appropriate criteria size”

T he size or number of criteria depends exclusively of the problem nature. The DM can’t decide if he wants 9, 15 or 45 criteria. In my opinion the number or criteria is not related with the selection method, but since you assert I, please explain on what it is based

‘Appropriate’? a certain problem has a number of criteria that is independent of the method.

6- “In each experiment, weights of two criteria are interchanged and the rest are kept unchanged”

Frankly, this is the first time that I hear this procedure. ‘Interchange weights”? What for?

What must be done is to work with all criteria that conform de solution, which are called ‘binding criteria’, and let them vary simultaneously

Anyway, these are my comments and I hope that they can help

Nolberto Munier