A Novel Approach for Group Decision Making Based on the Best–Worst Method (G-BWM): Application to Supply Chain Management

Gholamreza Haseli,Erfan Babaee Tirkolaee,Reza Sheikh,Jianqiang Wang,Hana Tomaskova

doi:10.3390/math9161881

Abstract

Due to the complexity of real-world multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) issues, analyzing different opinions from a group of decision makers needs to ensure appropriate decision making. The group decision-making methods collect preferences of the decision makers and present the best preferences using mathematical equations. The best–worst method (BWM) is one of the recently introduced MCDM methods that requires fewer pairwise comparisons to obtain the criteria weights than the other MCDM methods. In this research, we develop a novel approach to group decision-making problems based on the BWM called G-BWM. This approach helps us to analyze the preferences of decision makers to carry out democratic decision making using the BWM structure. In order to assess the applicability of the proposed methodology and represent its novelty, two numerical examples from the literature with the application to supply chain management (SCM) (i.e., green supplier selection and supplier development/segmentation) are examined and discussed. The results demonstrate the performance of our proposed G-BWM for group decision making in terms of a large number of decision makers, ease of use and achieving democratic decisions in the decision-making process.

Highlights

Decision making can be considered as the choice of the best alternative among a set of alternatives according to a number of effective criteria [1]
This study developed a novel approach for group decision making based on best–worst method (BWM), called G-BWM
The results revealed that the proposed G-BWM has a high consistency ratio and reliability

Summary

Introduction

Decision making can be considered as the choice of the best alternative among a set of alternatives according to a number of effective criteria [1]. We show how different decision makers with various degrees of importance can be categorized for optimal analysis It is demonstrated how the optimal weights of criteria are obtained without eliminating the opinions of decision makers who have minorities. The group decision-making method based on BWM introduced by Hafezalkotob and Hafezalkotob [44] adheres to the principles of reference and secondary comparisons and simultaneously supports the opinions of k decision makers (decision makers from the expert panel) and a senior decision maker. To prevent increasing the complexity of the mathematical model, the decision makers can be categorized based on their evaluations of the best and worst criteria. Given that the BWM employs a positive scale of 1, 9 to execute pairwise comparisons, the geometric mean is a suitable method to indicate the typical value for pairwise comparisons

Steps of G-BWM

Consistency Ratio

Linking Supplier Development to Supplier Segmentation

Comparative Analysis and Discussion

Findings

Conclusions and Outlook