A new hybrid simulation-based assignment approach for evaluating airlines with multiple service quality criteria

Evaluation of airlines based on service quality criteria can help to improve the processes of airlines, and also can give guidance to travel agencies to provide better choices for passengers and tourists. In this study, a hybrid simulation-based assignment approach is proposed to deal with multi-criteria decision making problems with a group of decision-makers. A probability distribution is used to model decision makers' opinions and constructing a stochastic decision matrix. Then some efficient multi-criteria decision -making methods are utilized for evaluating alternatives in a simulation process. The proposed approach is applied to a problem of evaluation of five airlines with respect to opinions of 58 experts on 28 criteria. The results show the efficiency of the proposed to handle decision-making problems with a large number of experts. Moreover, the evaluation results are more reliable than the other decision making approaches because of simulating decision-makers' opinions, using multiple methods and evaluating based on aggregative results. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.