Managing changes in alternatives and criteria during a dynamic multi-criteria group decision making process

Abstract

The appearance of novel Web technologies and the high amount of information available on the Internet make it difficult for a traditional group decision making method to work correctly. In this kind of environment, the debates become more complicated. For instance, new information arises at any time and some of the discussed information becomes old. Therefore, this situation requires the developing of novel group decision making methods that allow experts to carry out group decision making processes in dynamic contexts. Although there already exists methods that takes into account a variable set of alternatives, there is few research when this variation is present on the criteria values also. In this paper, a novel group decision making method that takes into account scenarios where the amount of criteria and alternatives vary over time is presented. Experts can also select the subset of alternatives and criteria that they want to provide information for. This way, they do not have to provide information for those situations they do not have knowledge about. Moreover, multi-granular fuzzy linguistic modelling methods are used for the experts to select the preference representation that they prefer.