A granulation of linguistic information in AHP decision-making problems

To be fully utilized, linguistic information present in decision-making, has to be made operational through information granulation. This study is concerned with information granulation present in the problems of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is available in the characterization of a pairwise assessment of alternatives studied in the decision-making problem. The granulation of entries of reciprocal matrices forming the cornerstone of the AHP is formulated as a optimization problem in which an inconsistency index is minimized by a suitable mapping of the linguistic terms on the predetermined scale. Particle Swarm Optimization is used as an optimization framework. Both individual and group decision-making models of AHP are discussed. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.