We've crunched the numbers and scored the boat paints according to the preferences you just entered. You find your ranking below, including the drivers that most influenced the result for you.
Click on the products to learn more about them. You drill down deeper at the end of the page or you can refine your preferences above.
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Weighing up many different properties like performance, price, and environmental impacts - and in the end, there is no clear overall winner.
However, it is hard to choose a winner when multiple criteria, such as environm ent (GHG) , Health (toxicity, water), Social (diversity), compliance (regulations, certificati ons) and Cost need to be considered. Challenges are:
We help you make a choice based on your preferences and integrated product performance profiles. You tell us about what's important to you and we roll this all u p into a clear ranking.
This showcase helps uses antifouling hull paint for boats. While price an d effectiveness might be easy criteria for your choice, it gets difficult when you want to factor the p aint's various environmental effects into your decision.
Our comparison tool is based on the results of a study commissioned by t he State of Washington (read more about it here). This Alternatives Assessment does not make a recommendation what product to use - but once we know what's important to you, we can help you with that.
At Makersite, we are building the platform that connects teams with the data, apps, and expertise they need to make, buy and sell great products. Launched in 2016, Makersite is already the largest database on the web on how products are made and used, their supply chains, risks, and eco-impacts. Teams around the world use Makersite to innovate, become sustainable, and learn from each other along the way.
We have launched this website (productview.info) as a spin-off to showcase the power of the Makersite platform for customers. This page uses Makersite data and Makersite's multi-criteria decision analysis tool which enables the comparison of arbitrary products across multiple dimensions. Sign up for free and try it out yourself at global.makersite.app!
All rights reserved for productview.info @ Makersite
The boat paint comparison presented here is a decision problem in 7 dimensions (the criteria Price, Performance, Human Hazard, Biocide Exposure, Environment, Boatyard CoCs, and VOC Exposure). The model we use is a simple linear utility aggregation model.
To understand the model, look at its 3 main parts:
This leads to the products' final utility scores (out of 100) that are used for the product ranking on the results page.
Except for the performance dimension, the smaller the raw data, the better. For example, smaller biocide exposure is better than larger biocide exposure. In each of these categories, the worst input data (i.e. the largest) is assigned a utility of 1. The value 0 receives a utility of 100. Between 0 and the worst value, we use a linear map from raw data to utilities. The only exception is the performance dimension. Here, a score of 0 has utility 0, a score of 5 has utility 100, and everything in between is mapped linearly.
Each of the pairwise comparison sliders allows the user to specify that one dimension is more important than the other by a factor of up to 8. These inputs are then combined with the existing setting (starting from a uniform prior) by computing the closest consistent set of dimension weights (computing the eigenvalues of the linear problem). Using pairwise comparisons to come up with weights is part of a method known as the Analytic Hierarchy Process. You can find some more information on that process here.
In the last step, the products' dimensional utilities are combined into a total product utility by using the weights obtained in the last step. This is just a simple weighted sum. The higher the total utility, the better. So we use the total product utility to rank the products according based on your specified preferences among the criteria.
Under construction
Our comparison tool is based on the results of a study conducted by Northwest Green Chemistry and Washinton State's Department of Ecology. You can read more about the study on Northwest Green Chemistry's homepage and access the actual study here.
In order to make the various dimensions easily comparable, we have carefully aggregated the study's resulting data into the table below.
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Not sure if your result is really right for you? There's wisdom in numbers, so check out to see what the crowd prefers.
Compare your results →
No hocus pocus: check out the underlying data and the study that it's based on.
See the full study →
There's no obvious way to weigh up 7 different criteria. But our method is transparent and easy to understand.
More about MCDA →If you have a question, we have an answer.
We look forward to hearing from you!