Symmetric projection group approach for promoting homogeneity in the analytic hierarchy process

摘要

The complexity of the socio-economic environment requires the involvement of a group of decision makers in the decision-making process. They can contribute the diversity of knowledge and experience that allow all the important aspects of the decision-making problem to be taken into account. In the aggregation process, the weights of the decision makers play an important role. In this paper we have focused on the group analytic hierarchy process (AHP). We emphasized the homogeneity of the opinions of the decision makers as the basis for determining the importance weights of the decision makers. We reviewed the projection method and its upgrades for determining decision makers weights and demonstrated with examples that they are not suitable for application in AHP. We proposed a new symmetric projection method that eliminates the imperfections of the previous projection methods. We proposed a Symmetric Projection Group Approach (SPGA) to derive group weights in AHP. To validate the SPGA, we selected four evaluation measures. The evaluation of the examples shows that the SPGA achieves good evaluation results compared to the other methods for deriving decision makers weights and is suitable for real-world applications.