Selection of Normalization Technique for Weighted Average Multi-criteria Decision Making

One of the main challenges when evaluating resilience frameworks is the aggregation of different criteria. To calculate the final level of resilience we have to measure different criteria and then fuse the information to obtain a score. Normalization is a crucial step in any decision making process of evaluation of alternatives or frameworks. Normalization transforms heterogeneous criteria data (qualitative, quantitative, different units, etc.) into numerical and comparable data to enable aggregation (fusion) of criteria to determine the rating of decision alternatives. In this study, we evaluate the effects of different normalization techniques on the most well-known multi-criteria (MCDM) method, called Weighted Average (WA) or SAW (Simple Additive Weighting). A small case study for selecting resilience frameworks illustrates our assessment process for selecting the suitable normalization technique.