Managing Interacting Criteria: Application to Environmental Evaluation Practices

The need for organizations to evaluate their environmental practices has been recently increasing. This fact has led to the development of many approaches to appraise such practices. In this paper, a novel decision model to evaluate company’s environmental practices is proposed to improve traditional evaluation process in different facets. Firstly, different reviewers’ collectives related to the company’s activity are taken into account in the process to increase company internal efficiency and external legitimacy. Secondly, following the standard ISO 14031, two general categories of environmental performance indicators, management and operational, are considered. Thirdly, since the assumption of independence among environmental indicators is rarely verified in environmental context, an aggregation operator to bear in mind the relationship among such indicators in the evaluation results is proposed. Finally, this new model integrates quantitative and qualitative information with different scales using a multi-granular linguistic model that allows to adapt diverse evaluation scales according to appraisers’ knowledge

An improvised similarity measure for generalized fuzzy numbers

Similarity measure between two fuzzy sets is an important tool for comparing various characteristics of the fuzzy sets. It is a preferred approach as compared to distance methods as the defuzzification process in obtaining the distance between fuzzy sets will incur loss of information. Many similarity measures have been introduced but most of them are not capable to discriminate certain type of fuzzy numbers. In this paper, an improvised similarity measure for generalized fuzzy numbers that incorporate several essential features is proposed. The features under consideration are geometric mean averaging, Hausdorff distance, distance between elements, distance between center of gravity and the Jaccard index. The new similarity measure is validated using some benchmark sample sets. The proposed similarity measure is found to be consistent with other existing methods with an advantage of able to solve some discriminant problems that other methods cannot. Analysis of the advantages of the improvised similarity measure is presented and discussed. The proposed similarity measure can be incorporated in decision making procedure with fuzzy environment for ranking purposes

A fuzzy hierarchical multiple criteria group decision support system - Decider - and its applications

Decider is a Fuzzy Hierarchical Multiple Criteria Group Decision Support System (FHMC-GDSS) designed for dealing with subjective, in particular linguistic, information and objective information simultaneously to support group decision making particularly on evaluation. In this chapter, the fuzzy aggregation decision model, functions and structure of Decider are introduced. The ideas to resolve decision and evaluation problems we have faced in the development and application of Decider are presented. Two real applications of the Decider system are briefly illustrated. Finally, we discuss our further research in this area. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

OWA-based aggregation operations in multi-expert MCDM model

This paper presents an analysis of multi-expert multi-criteria decision making (ME-MCDM) model based on the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operators. Two methods of modeling the majority opinion are studied as to aggregate the experts' judgments, in which based on the induced OWA operators. Then, an overview of OWA with the inclusion of different degrees of importance is provided for aggregating the criteria. An alternative OWA operator with a new weighting method is proposed which termed as alternative OWAWA (AOWAWA) operator. Some extensions of ME-MCDM model with respect to two-stage aggregation processes are developed based on the classical and alternative schemes. A comparison of results of different decision schemes then is conducted. Moreover, with respect to the alternative scheme, a further comparison is given for different techniques in integrating the degrees of importance. A numerical example in the selection of investment strategy is used as to exemplify the model and for the analysis purpose

Handling a large number of preferences in a multi-level decision-making process

The complexity of a decision is related to the number of persons that are involved, as well as to the diversity of their preferences based on their knowledge, experience or area of expertise. Consequently, it is a challenge to adequately handle a large number of heterogeneous preferences considering that all the participants are considered to be an important source of information to make better motivated decisions. Addressing this challenge constitutes the main motivation in this dissertation because these days decision makers seem to be increasingly interested in the opinions (or preferences) given by persons around a community (and sometimes around the world) through different sources including social media channels. This PhD study provides a set of tools that helps a decision maker to make better motivated decisions by a proper handling of a large number of preferences, identifying and evaluating relevant preferences and handling multiple perspectives. Herein, by 'preference' is meant a greater interest expressed by an individual for a particular alternative over others; by 'relevant' is meant a variety of preferences which are significant (or important) to a particular person acting as a decision maker; and by 'perspective' is understood a position (e.g., social, technical, financial or environmental) adopted by a decision maker when expressing his/ her preferences or constraints

The risk assessment of construction project investment based on prospect theory with linguistic preference orderings

Multiple experts decision-making (MEDM) can be regarded as a situation where a group of experts are invited to provide their opinions by evaluating the given alternatives, and then select the optimal alternative(s). As a useful linguistic expression model, linguistic preference orderings (LPOs) were established in which the order of alternatives and the relationships between two adjacent alternatives are fused well. Considering that prospect theory has the superiority in depicting risk attitudes (risk seeking for losses and risk aversion for gains) during the uncertain decision-making process, this paper develops a consensus model based on prospect theory to deal with MEDM problems with LPOs. Firstly, each LPO provided by expert is transformed into the responding DHLPR with complete consistency. Then, the reference point of expert is determined and the prospect preference matrix is established. Moreover, we can obtain the overall prospect consensus degree for a MEDM problem by calculating the similarity degree between individual and collective prospect preference matrix. Furthermore, a consensus improvement method is developed to complete the consensus reaching process. Finally, we apply the proposed method to deal with a practical MEDM problem involving the construction project investment, and make some comparative analyses with existing methods.National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 71771155China Postdoctoral Science Foundation 2020M680151Sichuan Postdoctoral Science special FoundationSichuan University Postdoctoral Interdisciplinary Innovation Startup FoundationFundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities YJ202015European Union (EU) TIN2016-75850-RSichuan Province System Science and Enterprise Development Research Center Xq20B0

A systematic review on multi-criteria group decision-making methods based on weights: analysis and classification scheme

Interest in group decision-making (GDM) has been increasing prominently over the last decade. Access to global databases, sophisticated sensors which can obtain multiple inputs or complex problems requiring opinions from several experts have driven interest in data aggregation. Consequently, the field has been widely studied from several viewpoints and multiple approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, there is a lack of general framework. Moreover, this problem is exacerbated in the case of experts’ weighting methods, one of the most widely-used techniques to deal with multiple source aggregation. This lack of general classification scheme, or a guide to assist expert knowledge, leads to ambiguity or misreading for readers, who may be overwhelmed by the large amount of unclassified information currently available. To invert this situation, a general GDM framework is presented which divides and classifies all data aggregation techniques, focusing on and expanding the classification of experts’ weighting methods in terms of analysis type by carrying out an in-depth literature review. Results are not only classified but analysed and discussed regarding multiple characteristics, such as MCDMs in which they are applied, type of data used, ideal solutions considered or when they are applied. Furthermore, general requirements supplement this analysis such as initial influence, or component division considerations. As a result, this paper provides not only a general classification scheme and a detailed analysis of experts’ weighting methods but also a road map for researchers working on GDM topics or a guide for experts who use these methods. Furthermore, six significant contributions for future research pathways are provided in the conclusions.The first author acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Universities [grant number FPU18/01471]. The second and third author wish to recognize their support from the Serra Hunter program. Finally, this work was supported by the Catalan agency AGAUR through its research group support program (2017SGR00227). This research is part of the R&D project IAQ4EDU, reference no. PID2020-117366RB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/ 501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Modelling Heterogeneity among Experts in Multi-criteria Group Decision Making Problems

Heterogeneity in group decision making problems has been recently studied in the literature. Some instances of these studies include the use of heterogeneous preference representation structures, heterogeneous preference representation domains and heterogeneous importance degrees. On this last heterogeneity level, the importance degrees are associated to the experts regardless of what is being assessed by them, and these degrees are fixed through the problem. However, there are some situations in which the experts’ importance degrees do not depend only on the expert. Sometimes we can find sets of heterogeneously specialized experts, that is, experts whose knowledge level is higher on some alternatives and criteria than it is on any others. Consequently, their importance degree should be established in accordance with what is being assessed. Thus, there is still a gap on heterogeneous group decision making frameworks to be studied. We propose a new fuzzy linguistic multi-criteria group decision making model which considers different importance degrees for each expert depending not only on the alternatives but also on the criterion which is taken into account to evaluate them.FUZZYLINGProject TIN200761079FUZZYLING-II Project TIN201017876PETRI Project PET20070460Andalusian Excellence Project TIC-05299project of Ministry of Public Works 90/0

Fudge: Fuzzy ontology building with consensuated fuzzy datatypes

An important problem in Fuzzy OWL 2 ontology building is the definition of fuzzy membership functions for real-valued fuzzy sets (so-called fuzzy datatypes in Fuzzy OWL 2 terminology). In this paper, we present a tool, called Fudge, whose aim is to support the consensual creation of fuzzy datatypes by aggregating the specifications given by a group of experts. Fudge is freeware and currently supports several linguistic aggregation strategies, including the convex combination, linguistic OWA, weighted mean and fuzzy OWA, and easily allows to build others in. We also propose and have implemented two novel linguistic aggregation operators, based on a left recursive form of the convex combination and of the linguistic OWA