Assesment of criteria considered at authorization of certification bodies with the methods of multiple criteria decision making

Certification bodies authorized by the Vocational Qualifications Authority are those which carry out testing and certification activities as personnel certification bodies for national qualifications developed on the basis of national or international occupational standards. These bodies which are accredited for the qualifications in question by either the Turkish Accreditation Agency (TÜRKAK) or other accreditation agencies having multilateral recognition agreements with the European Cooperation for Accreditation against a system in compliance with the conditions of TS EN ISO/IEC 17024 standard and authorized as a result of examination, audit and assessment by the Vocational Qualifications Authority. For the purpose of determining the weight of the authorization criteria of these bodies, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Data Envelopment Analysis and Integrated Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process, and the DEMATEL method and Integrated Application of the Analytic Network Process, as multi criteria decision making methods, were employed in this thesis. These methods were compared to one another as methods with dependency on criteria and methods without dependency on criteria based on expert opinion. In addition to these methods, a new method has been proposed as a result of the integration of the Analytic Hierarchy Process Data Envelopment Analysis data with the main criteria total relationship matrixderived from DEMATEL. This method has been applied to determine weights.Following the determination of weights, criteria have been classified accordingto their order of significance on method basis. An approach, proposed for use inthe assessment of testing and certification system of bodies has been designed onthe basis of the classification made by new proposed method.Key Words : Certification Bodies, Multiple Criteria Decision Making