Aggregation of individual preference structures in AHP-group decision making

This paper presents a new procedure, to which we have given the name Aggregation of Individual Preference Structures (AIPS), whose objective is to deal with multiactor decision making when using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as the methodological support. This procedure incorporates ideas similar to Borda count methods and transfers to the case of preference structures the principle of aggregation employed in the two approaches traditionally followed in AHP-group decision making (aggregation of individual judgments and aggregation of individual priorities). The new aggregation method allows us to capture: (i) the richness of uncertainty inherent to human beings; (ii) the vision of each decision maker within the context of the problem; (iii) the interdependencies between the alternatives being compared and (iv) the intensities of the preferences that each decision maker gives to these interdependencies. From the preference structure distribution associated to each decision maker, this new approach (AIPS) provides the holistic importance of each alternative and ranking, as well as the most representative preference structure distribution for the group. The knowledge derived from these could be employed as an initial step in the search for consensus, which characterises the negotiation processes followed by the actors involved in the resolution of decisional problems.