Assigning Decision Makers’ Weights Using TOPSIS Method In Spatial Multicriteria Group Decision Support System

Abstract

Weights of decision makers (DMs) play an important role in multiple attribute group decisionmaking problems, and how to attribute these weights is an exciting research topic.The latter problems constitute real organizational architectures where the decision is characterized by several criteria and involves different decision-makers (DMs) with different perspectives. In this paper, a weighting module is integrated into a webbased intelligent multi-criteria group decision support system. The latter module is responsible for weights assignement to DMs. It is based on a multi-criteria method called "Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution" (TOPSIS). The main idea is to obtain a ranking of decision-makers (from best to worst) according to various alternatives, and then use the Softmax function to determine their weights based on the TOPSIS ranking values. The new module was tested on a real case study in territorial planning. The obtained results demonstrate the impact of the weighting procedure on the final decision in the decisional process, as the final decision was influenced by the weight values assigned to DMs (importance degree). Future work will improve the weighting module to handle additional types of data, such as linguistic or fuzzy numbers.