Doubly Extended Fuzzy TOPSIS Method for Group Decision Making

Abstract

Multiple Criteria Decision Making methods, such as TOPSIS, have become very popular in recent years and are frequently applied to solve many real-life situations. However, the increasing complexity of the decision problems analysed makes it less feasible to consider all the relevant aspects of the problems by a single decision maker. As a result, many real-life problems are discussed by a group of decision makers. In such a group each decision maker can specialize in a different field and has his/her own unique characteristics, such as knowledge, skills, experience, personality, etc. This implies that each decision maker should have a different degree of influence on the final decision, i.e., the weights of decision makers should be different. The aim of this paper is to extend the fuzzy TOPSIS method to group decision making. The proposed approach uses TOPSIS twice. The first time it is used to determine the weights of decision makers which are then used to calculate the aggregated decision matrix for all the group decision matrices provided by the decision makers. Based on this aggregated matrix, the extended TOPSIS is used again, to rank the alternatives and to select the best one. A numerical example illustrates the proposed approach.