Determining weights of fuzzy attributes for multi-attribute decision-making problems based on consensus of expert opinions

Abstract

An important objective of a group decision-making problem is to determine the weights of attributes that are given by experts participating in the decision-making process. Since different decision-makers have unequal importance in decision-making, a series of studies focused on finding a set of appropriate weights for experts participating in a decision problem. In this paper, the problem of weight determination among decision-makers is investigated by extending an algorithm taken from the technique for order preference by similarity-to-ideal solution. In this case, a pair of most compromising and least compromising solutions is derived from individual judgments of decision-makers and then, these solutions are applied as the bases for determining the magnitude of individual alignment with the group opinion by using a closeness coefficient approach. Determining the weights of decision-makers, the group decision-making problem is then solved. Application of the proposed method is illustrated by a numerical example for the selection of a maintenance strategy.

Keyword : weights, multi-attribute, fuzzy, group decision-making, linguistic variable, triangular fuzzy number, most compromising solution, least compromising solution