A Group Decision-Aiding Protocol for Selecting a Post-industrial Cultural Tourism Product in Czeladź Commune in Poland

Abstract

The study aims to propose a decision-aiding protocol for selecting the best cultural tourism product for a commune to promote its post-industrial heritage. It is a peculiar decision-making problem in which the alternatives have a composite character, i.e., they consist of many simple products that may present additional value combined. The decision-maker uses the opinion of many potential stakeholders regarding the alternatives evaluation, and these stakeholders may differ in their cognitive capabilities. Given the above, we propose an approach that produces a compromise recommendation regarding which product to choose under different preferences declared by the subsequent stakeholders. The problem is structured first, which involves defining a set of composite alternatives by an expert team and discussing them in a series of workshops with the stakeholders. They may also define additional evaluation criteria based on the predefined set of common goals. In the next step, the information processing styles of stakeholders are identified to suggest the multiple criteria decision aiding technique that best fits each stakeholder’s cognitive capability. Finally, stakeholders’ preferences are standardized to make them comparable on a common scale and aggregated using the adopted model of minimum cost consensus. We show how some elements of this approach work in a real-world problem of promoting the post-industrial heritage of the southern Polish commune Czeladź.