Abstract:
Organizational decisions are often made in groups
where group members may be distributed geographically in
different locations. Furthermore, a decision-making process, in
practice, frequently involves various uncertain factors including
linguistic expressions of decision makers’ preferences and
opinions. This study first proposes a rational-political group
decision-making model which identifies three uncertain factors
involved in a group decision-making process: decision makers’
roles in a group reaching a satisfactory solution, preferences for
alternatives and judgments for assessment-criteria. Based on the
model, a linguistic term oriented multi-criteria group
decision-making method is developed. The method uses general
fuzzy number to deal with the three uncertain factors described
by linguistic terms and aggregates these factors into a group
satisfactory decision that is in a most acceptable degree of the
group. Moreover, this study implements the method by
developing a web-based group decision support system. This
system allows decision makers to participate a group
decision-making through the web, and manages the group
decision-making process as a whole, from criteria generation,
alternative evaluation, opinions interaction to decision
aggregation. Finally, an application of the system is presented to
illustrate the web-based group decision support system.
