A Rule-Based Decision Support Method Combining Variable Precision Rough Set and Stochastic Multi-Objective Acceptability Analysis for Multi-Attribute Decision-Making

In an open environment, the demands of users are diverse and dynamic because users can participate in product design from beginning to end. Owing to this, the disorderly and unplanned participation of users will greatly increase the complexity of multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) in the product design process. In order to ensure the smooth development of the open design process, the decision support model and method need to repeatedly provide decision makers (DMs) with necessary decision support information in a relatively short period of time, which can realize the evaluation of the scheme and improve the utilization efficiency of community resources. However, the process of eliciting preference information is complex, exhausting, inefficient, and time-consuming in existing methods, which will result in a poor decision-making. With the purpose of optimizing the eliciting process in MADM, a rule-based decision support method is proposed in this paper, where the process of eliciting preference information and decision-making are synchronized and guided by pre-extracted decision rules. The rules are deduced from comparison relations on attributes and their outcomes through the combination of variable precision rough set approach (VPRS) and stochastic multi-objective acceptability analysis (SMAA). With the concept of attribute reduction and approximation accuracy in rough set theory, the extracted rules could eliminate redundant attributes and assign the relative priority of preference information. Based on the extracted rules, the multi-attribute decision-making process could be carried out step by step in an orderly manner. In each step, DMs only need to provide partial preference information by non-quantitative statements according to extracted rules. Once the decision result is reliable enough, the eliciting and decision-making process can be terminated promptly. In order to validate the proposed approach, experiments of decision rule extraction are implemented, and the results show that the proposed approach is effective both in the weak rule extraction and the strong rule extraction.

Automated summary

In this paper, a rule-based decision support method is proposed to optimize the process of preference information elicitation in multi-attribute decision-making. The decision-making process is synchronized and guided by pre-extracted decision rules, which improves the efficiency and reliability of decision-making.