Fuzzy Group Decision Making to Select the Best Alternative for Development of Groundwater Resources

Abstract

Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) and group decision making (GDM) are two well practiced approaches to solve decision making problems. Group decision making combines opinions from Decision makers (DMs) into a coherent group decision. The aim of this paper is to develop a new fuzzy group decision making algorithm and apply it to a real-world groundwater development problem to select the most preferred alternative. Five decision makers (DMs) are selected to express their judgments about relative importance of 3 criteria (water pumped, cost, and risk) and have given their preferences as ordinal preferences, utility values, fuzzy preference relations and multiplicative preference relations. Decision makers' opinions are aggregated based on a fuzzy group decision making. Ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator has been used to aggregate decision makers' opinions. Consensus measure is also defined to evaluate convergence between group and individual opinions. The outcomes of the proposed algorithm show that proposed fuzzy group decision making process is a relevant approach to aggregate the individual expert’s opinion and is a desirable tool to reach consensus among DMs.