Fuzzy multiple attribute decision making: A review and new preference elicitation techniques

This paper reviews the main theories and methods used for multiple attribute decision making in a fuzzy environment. Fuzzy multiple attribute decisions involve two processes, the rating and the ranking of alternatives. If the rating results are crisp then the ranking procedure becomes straightforward; hence, the emphasis of this paper is on obtaining crisp ratings for alternatives. In order to aid the decision maker to express his/her attribute preferences, new elicitation techniques to determine attributes importance are proposed. These techniques range from statistical to scaling methods based on linguistic variables, and so enable a more versatile elicitation procedure as well as providing crisp preferences.