Evaluation of the results of multi-attribute group decision-making with linguistic information

Multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) has received increasing attentions in both engineering and economy fields. Correspondingly, many valuable methods have been developed to solve various MAGDM problems, but relatively, very few research results focus on the evaluation of the effect of MAGDM. In this paper, based on the existing MAGDM methods with linguistic information, three key evaluation indices, consistency, closeness and uniformity, are proposed to measure the results of MAGDM from different aspects. By comparing the individual overall preference values with the collective ones, the three indices cannot only provide a reference for judging the decision-making effect of each decision maker, but also reflect the effect of group decision-making to a certain extent. The practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method are shown by two heuristic examples. Furthermore, the proposed method will be helpful for setting and adjusting the weights of both attributes and decision makers, as well as for selecting and comparing various aggregation operators and methods in dynamic or interactive group decision-making. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.