Multiple criteria decision-making in heterogeneous groups of management experts

Abstract

In commercial organizations operations, frequently some dynamic events occur which involve operational, managerial, and valuable information aspects. Then, in order to make a sound decision, the business professional could be supported by a Multi Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) system for taking an external course of action, as, for instance, forecasting a new market or product, up to an inner decision concerning for instance, the volume of manufacture. Thus, managers need, in a collective manner, to analyze the actual problems, to evaluate various options according to diverse criteria, and finally choose the best solution from a set of various alternatives. Throughout these processes, uncertainty and hesitancy easily arise, when it comes to define and judge criteria or alternatives. Several approaches have been introduced to allow Decision Makers (DMs) to deal with. The Interval Multiplicative Preference Relations (IMPRs) approach is a useful technique and the basis of our proposed methodology to provide reliable consistent and in consensus IMPRs. In this manner, DMs' choices are implicitly including their uncertainty while maintaining both an acceptable individual consistency, as well as group consensus levels. The present method is based on some recent results and an optimization algorithm to derive reliable consistent and in consensus IMPRs. In order to illustrate our results and compare them with other methodologies, a few examples are addressed and solved.