Deriving weights from group fuzzy pairwise comparison judgement matrices

Several Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods involve pairwise comparisons to obtain the preferences of decision makers (DMs). This paper proposes a fuzzy group prioritization method for deriving group priorities/weights from fuzzy pairwise comparison matrices. The proposed method considers the different importance weights of multiple DMs by extending the Fuzzy Preferences Programming Method (FPP). The elements of the group pairwise comparison matrices are presented as fuzzy numbers rather than exact numerical values in order to model the uncertainty and imprecision in the DMs' judgments. Unlike the known fuzzy prioritization techniques, the proposed method is able to derive crisp weights from incomplete and fuzzy set of comparison judgments and doesn't require additional aggregation procedures. A prototype of a decision tool is developed to assist DMs to use the proposed method for solving fuzzy group prioritization problems. A detailed numerical example is used to illustrate the proposed approach. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.