A simulation-based approach to solving hybrid multi-attribute group decision making problem.
What is it about?
In order to provide a complete understanding of decision makers’ preference structure, this paper takes a stochastic perspective and proposes a simulation-based approach to facilitate MAGDM under uncertainty when both quantitative and qualitative attributes are involved.
Why is it important?
Compared to existing simulation-based models, the main characteristics of the proposed approach that lead to its novelty are as follows: (1) it captures DMs’ hesitancy about linguistic expressions by allowing the use of comparative linguistic expressions under a general simulation framework; (2) it samples realizations of attribute weights from a set of prespecified weight constraints and thus explicitly takes into account the incomplete attribute weight information during the decision making process; and (3) it is capable of solving MAGDM problems involving both comparative linguistic expressions and numerical information.