Fuzzy AHP and FCM-driven Hybrid Group Decision Support Mechanism

퍼지 AHP와 퍼지인식도 기반의 하이브리드 그룹 의사결정지원 메커니즘

In this research, we propose a hybrid group decision support mechanism (H-GDSM) based on Fuzzy AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and FCM (Fuzzy Cognitive Map). The AHP elicits a corresponding priority vector interpreting the preferred information among the decision makers. Corresponding vector was composed of the pairwise comparison values of a set of objects. Since pairwise comparison values are the judgments obtained from an appropriate semantic scale. However, AHP couldn't represent the causal relationship among information, which were used by decision makers. In contrast to AHP, FCM could represent the causal relationship among variables or information. Therefore, FCMs were successfully developed and used in several ill-structured domains, such as strategic decision-making, policy making, and simulations. Nonetheless, many researchers used subjective and voluntary inputs to simulate the FCM. As a result of subjective inputs, it couldn't avoid the rebukes of businessman. To overcome these limitations, we incorporated the Fuzzy membership functions, AHP and FCM into a H-GDSM. In contrast to current AHP methods and FCMs, the H-GDSM method developed herein could concurrently tackle the pairwise comparison involving causal relationships under a group decision-making environment. The strengths and contributions of our mechanism were 1) handling of qualitative knowledge and causal relationships, 2) extraction of objective input value to simulate the FCM, 3) multi-phase group decision support based on H-GDSM. To validate our proposed mechanism we developed a simple prototype system to support negotiation-based decisions in electronic commerce (EC).