Web-based Multi-Criteria Group Decision Support System with Linguistic Term Processing Function

Organizational decisions are often made in groups where group members may be distributed geographically in different locations. Furthermore, a decision-making process, in practice, frequently involves various uncertain factors including linguistic expressions of decision makers’ preferences and opinions. This study first proposes a rational-political group decision-making model which identifies three uncertain factors involved in a group decision-making process: decision makers’ roles in a group reaching a satisfactory solution, preferences for alternatives and judgments for assessment-criteria. Based on the model, a linguistic term oriented multi-criteria group decision-making method is developed. The method uses general fuzzy number to deal with the three uncertain factors described by linguistic terms and aggregates these factors into a group satisfactory decision that is in a most acceptable degree of the group. Moreover, this study implements the method by developing a web-based group decision support system. This system allows decision makers to participate a group decision-making through the web, and manages the group decision-making process as a whole, from criteria generation, alternative evaluation, opinions interaction to decision aggregation. Finally, an application of the system is presented to illustrate the web-based group decision support system.