Tag: KES2014

Complex Ranking Procedures

Complex Ranking Procedures is a paper co-authored by Barbara Sandrasagra and Michael Soltys, that appeared in a Special Issue of Fundamenta Informaticae dedicated to a method of ranking known as Pairwise Comparisons (Volume 144, Number 3-4, Pages 223-240, 2016). The full paper can be found here: http://doi.org/10.3233/FI-2016-1331.

This paper is a continuation of work that was first presented at the conference KES2014, tilted Fair ranking in competitive bidding procurement: A case analysis, and where it was given the best paper award; click tag kes2014 for more background.

In Complex Ranking Procedures we propose a research program for developing a formal framework for ranking procedures based on the Pairwise Comparisons method. We are interested in the case where relatively few items are to be ranked with a complex procedure and according to a large number of criteria. A typical example of this scenario is a competition where several companies bid for a contract, and where the selection of the winner is done with multiple criteria according to an intricate selection procedure. Several other applications are suggested.

The mathematics of Pan Am contracts

I wrote a mathematical analysis of the bidding process for the security of the Pan Am games (submitted to KES2014 conference):

I found problems with how the bidding score is computed, and the Globe & Mail picked the story.

Though my write up consisted of several pages of math, the Globe & Mail went for the (important) bottom line 🙂 as you can read here:

The price bidders submitted made up 40 per cent of the final score for each finalist. “The money amount was not given a proportionate weight,” suggested Michael Soltys, a professor in McMaster’s computing and software department (Mr. Soltys is also a consultant for a company that is owned by Reilly Security).

Other newspaper stories on the Pan Am bidding process: