Selection of the optimal lettuce cultivar to agronomic traits in summer production using multicriteria decision-making MABAC method- Abstract

Five lettuce cultivars ('Kiribati', 'Tourbillon', 'Carmesi', 'Lianabel', and 'Biondonna') were grown in the open-field experiment during the summer of 2018. The aim was to find the optimal summer lettuce cultivar according to morphological and production parameters, suitable for the fresh market and food industry processing by applying the MABAC (Multi-Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison) method. The correlation analysis was carried out to reduce the number of criteria that have high coefficient values and a double influence on the ranking results. The study involved five alternatives (cultivars) and five different criteria regarding morphological parameters (rosette height, rosette diameter, rosette fresh weight, number of leaves, and stem height). Weight coefficients were determined using the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method while the stability of the obtained ranking list was determined by applying sensitive analysis through six scenarios. According to the selected criteria, the obtained results showed that the green cultivar 'Tourbillon' has the best results, while the least favorable results were obtained by the red cultivar 'Carmesi'. Furthermore, this study tends to facilitate cultivar selection by farmers to avoid economic losses and sustain the required quantity and quality standard demands for the fresh product and food industry market.