Comparative evaluation of three interactive multiobjective programming techniques as group decision support tools

The difficulty involved in finding a compromise solution to a multiobjective problem increases drastically when the participation of multiple decision makers becomes necessary. This is primarily due to the unique preference structures of the decision makers whose individual judgments of the ‘best compromise’ rarely coincide. In spite of the difficulty associated with such multiple-objective, multiple decision maker problems, nominal and/or interacting groups have been found to improve overall decision making effectiveness. This paper compares the performance of three interactive multiobjective programming procedures in determining a compromise solution to a group decision problem. Three multiobjective programming techniques originally designed for a single decision maker are augmented with a practical preference aggregation component in order to capture the preferences of several individual decision makers. Analysis of variance was used to study data collected through a repeated measures design in which groups of experimental subjects were exposed to all three methods. Independent variables include the three group decision procedures as the treatment variable, plus various control factors. Method performance and user satisfaction are the dependent measures.