A Group Decision-Making Approach in MCDM: An Application of the Multichoice Best–Worst Method

Abstract

Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques have successfully been used to address a wide range of real-world decision-making issues. The best–worst method (BWM) is one of the several deterministic MCDM approaches. A recently proposed method called the multichoice best–worst method (MCBWM) takes into account several linguistic terms for pairwise comparisons of relative preferences among the criteria. It has been shown that the MCBWM approach has advantages over BWM: it reduces the calculation and determines optimal weight values by providing the choices for the optimal solution. This paper proposes a unique method for group decision-making based on MCBWM. We extended the MCBWM to solve group decision-making problems. A novel solution approach was developed and validated for multiple problems. Two examples and one case study were solved using the proposed approach to demonstrate the validity and application of the proposed method. The results were further compared with existing models to validate the proposed approach. We found that the obtained ranking order for all problems is the same and that the proposed model has a higher consistency ratio than the existing approaches. This method can be extended to other mathematical programming models for collective decision making in uncertain situations.