Reducing incomparability in multicriteria decision analysis: an extension of the ZAPROS method

The ZAPROS method belongs to the Verbal Decision Analysis framework, and it aims at solving decision-making problems in a more realistic way from the decision maker's point of view. Quan- titative methods can lead to loss of information when attempting to assign accurate measurements to verbal values. However, the feature exposed can cause a decrease in the comparison power of the method, making the incomparability cases between the alternatives unavoidable and leading to an unsatisfactory result of the problem, thus leading to an unsatisfactory outcome of the problem. Considering the limitation exposed, this work presents a methodological approach structured on the ZAPROS method to assist in decision- making in the Verbal Decision Analysis. The aim is to produce a complete result which is satisfactory to the decision maker, through the reduction of the cases of incomparability between alternatives. The modifi- cations were mainly applied to the comparison of alternatives process and did not change the computational complexity of the method.