A FRAMEWORK FOR CAPTURING UNCERTAINTY OF GROUP DECISION-MAKING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE AHP/ANP

Abstract

Addressing uncertainty in the framework of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and its general form, the analytic network process (ANP), has been a dynamic field of research for the last four to five decades. Two directions of research emerged in this domain: the simulation approach and the fuzzy set theory (FST) approach. In this paper, we propose the integration of these two approaches in the context of AHP/ANP to elucidate group decision-making problems. FST is used to handle impreciseness of judgments of individual decision-maker while simulation is used to capture uncertainty brought about by the variability and randomness in aggregating decision-makers’ judgments. These processes are applied at the level of the pairwise comparisons matrices in order to maintain the integrity of the general methodology of the AHP/ANP. The contribution of this work is on developing a methodology that addresses uncertainty both in individual and in group decision-making. The general framework and the detailed methodology are presented in this work. A simple case is used to show the computations.