Designing a group decision support system under uncertainty using group Fuzzy analytic network process (ANP)

Handling uncertainty in decision making is recently receiving considerable attention by researchers. Advances in group Fuzzy analytic network process (ANP) are discussed to support decision making because of the complexity and vagueness under uncertainty. An adaptive group Fuzzy ANP group decision support system (DSS) under uncertainty is put forth that makes up for some deficiencies in the conventional ANP. Fuzzy judgments are firstly used when it is difficult to characterize the uncertainty by point-valued judgments due to partially known information, and a bipartite graph is formulated to model the problem of group decision making under uncertainty. Then, a Fuzzy prioritization method is proposed to derive the local priorities from missing or inconsistent Fuzzy pairwise comparison judgments. As a result of the unlikeliness for all the decision makers to evaluate all elements under uncertainty, an original aggregation method is developed to cope with the situation where some of the local priorities are missing. Finally, an evaluation of petroleum contaminated site remedial countermeasures using the proposed group Fuzzy ANP, indicates that the presented group DSS can effectively handle uncertainty and support group decision making with high level of user satisfaction.   Key words: Group decision support, uncertainty, analytic network process, group Fuzzy ANP, aggregation, site remedial countermeasures.