Adapting Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment to fuse preference orderings in manufacturing applications

A rather common problem in the manufacturing field includes: (i) a collection of objects to be compared on the basis of the degree of some attribute, (ii) a set of judges that individually express their subjective judgments on these objects, and (iii) a single collective judgment, which is obtained by fusing the previous subjective judgments. The goal of this contribution is to develop a new technique that combines the Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment (LCJ) with an ad hoc response mode based on preference orderings. Apart from being relatively practical and user-friendly, this technique allows to express the collective judgment of objects on a ratio scale and is applicable to a variety of practical contexts in the field of manufacturing. The description of the proposed technique is integrated with the application to a practical case study.