Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Agricultural and Textile Systems

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) has emerged as a vital framework for resolving complex choices in both agricultural production and textile manufacturing. By integrating economic, environmental and technical criteria, MCDM enables stakeholders to balance yield, quality, cost, resource use and sustainability objectives. In agriculture, applications span from selecting optimal crop varieties and mechanisation options to prioritising bio-based feedstocks for materials. In textiles, decision makers employ MCDM to rank fibre types, fabric constructions and processing routes under competing demands for comfort, durability, environmental impact and market potential. Recent methodological advances include the integration of outranking approaches, weighted aggregation techniques and fuzzy logic to manage uncertainty in expert judgements and data variability. The global significance of these tools is evident in their capacity to support food security, reduce chemical and water footprints, foster circular bioeconomies and drive innovation in sustainable textiles. Concrete examples range from frameworks guiding bio-plastic precursor selection to breeding programmes that accelerate the identification of elite germplasm. Overall, MCDM offers a structured yet adaptable pathway to inform policy, optimise value chains and reconcile multiple stakeholder perspectives in agricultural and textile sectors.

Research from Nature Portfolio

No recent Nature Portfolio content available.

Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Agricultural and Textile Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in multi-criteria decision making in agricultural and textile systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM): A collection of methods to evaluate and prioritise alternatives based on multiple, often conflicting, criteria.

Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS): An MCDM method that ranks alternatives by their distance to an ideal best and an ideal worst solution.

Simple Additive Weighting (SAW): A straightforward scoring method in which each alternative’s attribute values are multiplied by criterion weights and then summed.

ELECTRE: A family of outranking methods that compare alternatives pairwise to establish dominance relations based on concordance and discordance indices.

Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets (PFSs): An extension of fuzzy sets allowing independent representation of membership and non-membership degrees, suited to uncertain or imprecise evaluations.

Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation: A technique that applies fuzzy set theory to synthesise multiple qualitative and quantitative criteria into an overall performance score.

References

1. A multi-criteria decision-making framework and analysis of vegetable oils to produce bio-based plastics. Industrial Crops and Products (2022).
2. Development of the ELECTRE Method Under Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets Based on Existing Correlation Coefficients for Cotton Fabric Selection. Journal of Natural Fibers (2023).
3. Development of a multicriteria decision-making model for evaluating hybrid offspring in the sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas L.) breeding process. Breeding Science (2023).