A hybrid AHP-PROMETHEEII group decision support procedure with decision-makers’ weights assignment: Application in spatial localization

Abstract Organizations and companies are getting increasingly enormous, comprising a significant number of managers and associates from all over the world. This globalization increases the complexity of decisions made within firms, as many decision-makers are engaged, each with their own view of the situation, and a variety of variables impact those judgments. The latter problem is referred to as Multicriteria Group Decision making (MGDM). Decision-makers in MGDM may have varying levels of power within the group; to express this authority, a weight should be assigned to each of them. Due to the impact of these weight values, this process of attributing weights must be held with care. In this paper the authors propose a strategy based on the PROMETHEE II method to handle MGDM problems; in the latter procedure, decision makers' weights are given objectively based on their contribution to the process. The main idea is to employ PROMETHEE II at three different levels: individual rating, weights attribution, and group ranking. The approach was put to the test on a real-world case study in territorial planning. This approach should be enhanced to take into account fuzzy and linguistic numbers, and it should be extended to additional application areas.