A decision support model for multi-attribute group decision making using a multi-objective optimization approach

The multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problem has received considerable attention in the decision analysis field and fruitful achievements have been reported in the literature. This paper focuses on the MAGDM in which the subjective absolute judgement on alternatives with respect to evaluating attributes are represented by fuzzy numbers. This paper employs the consensus degree to measure the agreement level of a MAGDM solution and develops a new measure degree–departure degree to evaluate how far the decision makers from their initial decision preferences. Based on these two conflicting measure degrees, the decision process of MAGDM is modelled as a multi-objective optimization problem. A decision support model (DSM) for MAGDM is proposed. The proposed DSM, incorporating five implementing phases, aims at obtaining acceptable decision solution(s) by solving the multi-objective optimization problem and conducting an interactive procedure with decision makers. In case study, this paper takes the alternative selection problem about hydroelectric project to illustrate the phases and procedure of the proposed DSM.