  The central problem in this work is to compute a ranking of a set of elements
which is "closest to" a given set of input rankings of the elements. We define
"closest to" in an established way as having the minimum sum of Kendall-Tau
distances to each input ranking. Unfortunately, the resulting problem Kemeny
consensus is NP-hard for instances with n input rankings, n being an even
integer greater than three. Nevertheless this problem plays a central role in
many rank aggregation problems. It was shown that one can compute the
corresponding Kemeny consensus list in f(k) + poly(n) time, being f(k) a
computable function in one of the parameters "score of the consensus", "maximum
distance between two input rankings", "number of candidates" and "average
pairwise Kendall-Tau distance" and poly(n) a polynomial in the input size. This
work will demonstrate the practical usefulness of the corresponding algorithms
by applying them to randomly generated and several real-world data. Thus, we
show that these fixed-parameter algorithms are not only of theoretical
interest. In a more theoretical part of this work we will develop an improved
fixed-parameter algorithm for the parameter "score of the consensus" having a
better upper bound for the running time than previous algorithms.
