Evaluating the sustainable strategies of fishing industry by using TOPSIS

Since World Commission on Environment and Development published the so-called Brundtland Report “Our Common Future” in 1987, and the United Nations Environmental Planning Board presented “Agenda 21” in 1992, sustainable development has become an important philosophy to integrating economic, environmental, social and ethical considerations. In this study, we establish hierarchy system for evaluation of fishing industry, and then exploit multicriteria decision analysis to derive the synthetic values of the sustainable development strategies corresponding to considered criteria. In addition, we proposed a multiobjective compromise optimization called TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) to solve the optimal strategy with Minkowski’s L
p
-metric concept. The optimal compromise solution should have the shortest distance from the positive ideal solution as well as the farthest distance from the negative ideal solution. Through this study, we successfully demonstrate that TOPSIS is a good assessment for evaluation of multiple criteria decision making problems.