A conflict-eliminating approach for emergency group decision of unconventional incidents

In multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems, the conflict-elimination process is a vital procedure to get an agreement with low degree of conflict for emergency decision of unconventional incidents. In this paper, we put forward a discrete model to support the conflict-elimination process. Firstly, based on the contribution of each expert to the group opinion, a weight-updating model is constructed to adjust the experts' weights. In preference-modifying process, an iterative algorithm is proposed to adjust the individual preferences which have the maximum deviation from the corresponding group one to retain the original opinion of experts as much as possible. Then, the choice of the best alternative(s) from the group decision is obtained by the simple additive weighting (SAW) method. Finally, an illustrate example and comparative analysis with the existing methods are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.