A group decision making procedure for fuzzy interactive linear assignment programming

Managers in the current business environment face with many decision making problems that affect viability of their organization. Decision making tools and evaluation instruments can help the managers to make more accurate decisions. This paper presents a new decision making tool when decision data are not crisp and the decision maker(s) want(s) to rank the alternatives during an interactive process. In this paper we propose an interactive method which uses qualitative data to calculate weights of criteria and rank the selected alternatives. Because of existence of linguistic terms in the decision matrix and the weight of each criterion which can be expressed in trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, an interactive method is proposed for ranking of each alternative with the best weight for each criterion. Using this method, decision makers can provide and modify their preference information gradually within the process of decision making so as to make the decision result more reasonable. A numerical hypothetical example has been illustrated the proposed method. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.