A Hybrid Approach Based on the Two Weight Vectors and Extended TOPSIS Methods with Application in Cybersecurity

Evaluating alternatives in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is particularly challenging in domains like cybersecurity. This paper proposes a hybrid multi-criteria approach (TWV-ETOP), that combines the new two weight vectors (TWV) weighting method with the extended TOPSIS (ETOPSIS) method that uses the Minkowski metric. The main novelty of TWV lies in its reduced computational complexity: the optimization problem involves only two variables, compared to [Formula: see text] variables in the classical Best-Worst Method (BWM), as well as in the introduction of a transparent and user-adjustable consistency calculation based on explicit vector norms. The TWV-ETOP approach is applied to calculate a cybersecurity composite index (CSEC) for ten Eastern European countries, based on six cybersecurity indexes and a digital performance index. In the numerical example, the TWV produced criteria weights very close to those obtained with BWM (maximum absolute difference: 0.0131) while being simpler to compute. The composite CSEC index generated by the hybrid approach provided a robust and comprehensive ranking of countries, with four countries consistently identified across all tested metrics. By combining the computational efficiency of TWV with the flexibility of ETOPSIS, the proposed TWV-ETOP approach offers a transparent and powerful tool for multi-criteria decision analysis in cybersecurity and other domains requiring composite index construction.