The Role of the DS/AHP in Identifying Inter-Group Alliances and Majority Rule Within Group Decision Making

Abstract

DS/AHP is a nascent method of multi-criteria decision-making, based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and indirectly the Analytic Hierarchy Process. It is concerned with the identification of the levels of preference that decision makers have towards certain decision alternatives (DAs), through preference judgements made over a number of different criteria. The working result from a DS/AHP analysis is the body of evidence (BOE), which includes a series of mass values that represent the exact beliefs in the best DA(s) existing within certain subsets of DAs. This paper considers the role of DS/AHP as an aid to group decision-making, through the utilisation of a distance measure (between BOEs). Here, the distance measure enables the identification of the members of the decision-making group who are in most agreement, with respect to the judgements they have individually made. The utilisation of a single linkage dendrite approach to clustering elucidates an appropriate order to the aggregation of the judgements of the group members. This develops the DS/AHP method as a tool to identify inter-group alliances, as well as introduce a 'majority rule' approach to decision-making through consensus building.

A decision support model for identification and prioritization of key performance indicators in the logistics industry

“…For this reason, the developed model is intended to be applicable to the entire logistics industry rather than just to the included alternatives or a customer. Thus, a 15x15 influence matrix was sent to each expert in order to determine the relationships among the performance indicators in the model, and then, by applying the majority rule of the experts' choices (Beynon, 2006), the final influence matrix was generated.…”

A Decision Rule Aggregation Approach to Multiple Criteria-Multiple Participant Sorting

“…In some applications of DS theory to MCDA, including DeKorvin and Shipley (1993), Yang and Singh (1994) and Butler et al (1995), the BBA is based on uncertainty in preference over alternatives, reflecting conflicting criteria. A recent series of papers, including Beynon et al (2000) and Beynon (2002Beynon ( , 2005Beynon ( , 2006, systematically utilizes DS theory to develop a DS-AHP procedure for GDM that improves the "standard" AHP analysis (Saaty 1980) by reducing the number of pairwise comparisons and eliminating the need to check for inconsistent pairwise judgements.…”

A Study on DS-SVM-Based Forecast Model from the View of Information Fusion

“…Such as group decision making, data fusion, and multiple attribute evaluation [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Many researchers have refined and expanded the evidence theory [3,4,[8][9][10][11][12].…”