Patent ID: 7552104

Claim:
A computer-implemented decision support method for two or more pre-defined criteria and two or more profiles, each criterion comprising two or more pre-defined and ordinally ranked categories, each profile comprising a set of two or more of the criteria, each criterion in the set associated with one of the categories for that criterion, the method comprising: performing a comparative assessment of profiles, wherein the comparative assessment comprises an ordinal pairwise ranking of profile pairs, ordinal pairwise ranking of profile pairs comprising: generating undominated profile pairs, each undominated profile pair comprising two profiles wherein one profile has a higher ranked category on at least one criterion and a lower ranked category on at least one other criterion than the other profile; presenting the undominated profile pairs to a decision maker for ordinal pairwise ranking; receiving from the decision maker an ordinal pairwise ranking of the profiles; and identifying profile pairs that are implicitly ordinally pairwise ranked as corollaries of ordinal pairwise rankings performed and excluding the profile pairs from subsequent presentation to the decision maker; the decision support method further comprising: solving a system of equalities/inequalities that represents the ordinal pairwise rankings of profile pairs to obtain at least one output, the at least one output including a point value for each category on each criterion, a ranking of all possible profiles, or a ranking of a subset of all possible profiles.