A nonparametric method for defining a global preference ranking of industrial products

Although experimentation is a crucial stage in the process of research and development of industrial products, no satisfactory procedure is available to deal with the common but rather important industrial problem of defining a preference ranking among all the studied product prototypes on the basis of performances. In this paper we propose a two-stage non-parametric procedure in which we firstly perform a set of C-sample testing procedures, followed by multiple comparisons, in this way evaluating a set of partial preference rankings, and secondly synthesise the partial rankings by combining them into a global ranking that provides a general product preference rule. The proposed method is particularly useful in the context of industrial experimentation and offers several advantages such as effectiveness, high flexibility and practical adherence to real problems where preference ranking is a natural goal.