Fuzzy goal programming with different importance and priorities

This paper formulates fuzzy goal programming (FGP) incorporating different importance and preemptive priorities by using an additive model to maximize the sum of achievement degrees of all fuzzy goals. In contrast to previous works, the proposed approach allows the decision-maker to determine a desirable achievement degree for each fuzzy goal to reflect explicitly the relative importance of these goals. This approach can generate a set of achievement degrees consistent with the decision-maker's expectations, even though the relative importance of the goals may change. Furthermore, in this paper we incorporate the decision-maker's preemptive priority structure into a single formulation. The resulting solutions satisfy both the preemptive priority structure and have the maximum achievement degrees in sum. The proposed approaches' effectiveness and computational superiority over the existing approaches are demonstrated and compared with examples from the literature. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.