Launch vehicle selection for a geostationary communication satellite using data envelopment analysis

In space business, launch vehicle selection for a satellite is a crucial managerial and technical decision making problem taking into consideration of various qualitative and quantitative factors. The aim of this paper is to solve this complicated supplier selection problem by analyzing several Geostationary Transfer Orbit launch vehicle alternatives, which have very high costs measured in million dollars. For this purpose, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is utilized and the results are compared with two popular Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tools namely, AHP and PROMETHEE. The results indicate that all applied methods ranked the same alternative as the best. However, such a strong consensus is not observed for the worst alternative. In this context, DEA seems to determine the best alternative using less information compared to AHP and PROMETHEE.