A Formal Approach to Handling Conflicts in Multiattribute Group Decision Making

Supporting the decision of a group in engineering design is a challenging and complicated problem when issues like consensus and compromise must be taken into account. In this paper, we present the foundations of the group hypothetical equivalents and inequivalents method and two fundamental extensions making it applicable to new classes of group decision problems. The first extension focuses on updating the formulation to place unequal importance on the preferences of the group members. The formulation presented in this paper allows team leaders to emphasize the input from certain group members based on experience or other factors. The second extension focuses on the theoretical implications of using a general class of aggregation functions. Illustration and validation of the developments are presented using a vehicle selection problem. Data from ten engineering design groups are used to demonstrate the application of the method. DOI: 10.1115/1.2197836