Projection-Based Approach for Deriving Decision Makers’ Weights in DEMATEL

Abstract

To successfully solve complex real-world problems, decision makers with broad knowledge and experience should be involved in the decision-making process. In this paper, we address the question of how to determine weights of decision makers. The aim of our study is to propose a new approach that derives objective weights for decision makers based on projection method, which emphasizes their agreement by assigning higher weights to similar opinions. The new projection method DProj is specifically adapted for Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), which allows to determine the relationship between cause and effect factors of the system, while we show that some projection methods from the literature are not suitable for DEMATEL. To validate DProj-DEMATEL, we performed two analyses based on Manhattan and Euclidean distances on three examples from the literature. The validation results show that DProj-DEMATEL is a reliable method that can contribute to satisfactory group decision making.