A consensus support system for group decision making problems with heterogeneous information

Abstract

A group decision making (GDM) problem is a decision process where several decision makers (experts, judges, etc.) participate and try to reach a common solution. In the literature these problems have been solved carrying out a selection process that returns the solution set of alternatives from the preferences given by the experts. In order to achieve an agreement on the solution set of alternatives among the experts, it would be adequate to carry out a consensus process before the selection process. In the consensus process the experts discuss and change their preferences in order to achieve a big agreement. Due to the fact that the experts may belong to different research areas, they may express their preferences in different information domains. In this contribution we focus on the consensus process in GDM problems defined in heterogeneous contexts where the experts express their preferences by means of numerical, linguistic and interval-valued assessments. We propose a consensus support system model to automate the consensus reaching process, which provides two main advantages: (1) firstly, its ability to cope with GDM problems with heterogeneous information by means of the Fuzzy Sets Theory, and, (2) secondly, it assumes the moderator's tasks, figure traditionally presents in the consensus reaching process. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.