Multicriteria Group Decision-Making System (MGDM-Sy) Based on Heterogeneous Preference Elicitation Formats

Abstract

This study presents MGDM-Sy, a multicriteria group decision-making system that supports heterogeneous preference elicitation within a unified computational environment. The system allows evaluators participating in the same decision problem to express their preferences using different preference elicitation formats, including ordering of alternatives, direct scoring, and pairwise comparison. Heterogeneous preference representations are automatically transformed into a common score representation suitable for aggregation. For pairwise comparisons, MGDM-Sy incorporates a consistency-improvement mechanism that assists decision-makers in identifying and correcting inconsistent judgments while preserving the original assessments as much as possible. The system also performs consensus analysis at both the individual and group levels and generates decision-support reports. In addition, MGDM-Sy incorporates two methodological contributions: the Card Sorting method, which combines ordering and pairwise comparison while allowing the assignment of zero importance to alternatives, and the Consensus Degree-Enhancement tool, which improves group consensus by filtering assessments according to their individual consensus degree. The system is illustrated through two multicriteria group decision-making applications: (i) the prioritization of regions for agrivoltaic system deployment and (ii) the weighting of the criteria composing the Cost of Doing Business Index. The results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework and show that the Consensus Degree-Enhancement tool increases the group consensus degree while preserving representative assessments that would otherwise be unnecessarily excluded.