Comparison of some aggregation techniques using group analytic hierarchy process

Abstract

Group decision making is an important part of multiple criteria decision making and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The aim of this paper was to compare group AMP methods. Seven simple group AMP aggregation techniques that could be attractive for applications selected from the vast array of group AHP models proposed in the literature were selected for evaluation. We developed three new measures of evaluation: group Euclidean distance, group minimum violations, and distance between weights for the purpose of evaluation. The results of seven group AMP methods of the theoretical example were evaluated by three new evaluation measures, satisfactory index and fitting performance index. Furthermore, a case study of a decision making problem from the construction engineering field was performed and nine group AMP aggregation techniques, seven of them formerly presented and two new two stage group approaches were applied. Finally, the case study was evaluated using all five measures for each of the nine group decision making methods. The results showed that not all group AMP methods are equally convenient and that the selection of the method depended on the specific application. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.