Generating consensus priority interval vectors for group decision-making in the analytic hierarchy process

Many practical and important decision-making problems are complicated by at least two factors: (1) the qualitative/subjective nature of some criteria often results in uncertainty in the individual ratings; and (2) group decision-making is involved and some means of aggregating individual ratings is required. Traditionally, both individual and group priorities have been represented as point estimates, but this approach presents severe limitations for accommodating imprecision in the decision-making process. This paper examines the group decision-making problem in the context where priorities are represented as numeric intervals. A set of techniques that could be used at some of the phases of an analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-based group decision-making process, which has the objective of generating a ‘consensus’ priority that represents the group's opinion with regards to the relative importance of a set of N objects (e.g. criteria, alternatives), is presented.