On the satisfaction-based approach to group decision making with interval ordinal preferences

A new method for group decision making (GDM) is developed where the information about the alternatives provided by the experts can be represented using ordinal interval numbers. The proposed approach applies the idea of satisfactory principle which says that if the performance of an alternative is as at least good as all the others under some predefined criteria, then it should be selected. Each ordinal interval number is transformed to a probability vector. These probability vectors are then aggregated into corresponding collective probability vectors iwhich form a collective probability matrix. The satisfactory principle is introduced to the collective probability matrix and then a collective preference ordered vector is derived based on which decision can be made. Some extensions of the proposed approach are discussed. A numerical example is given to show how the proposed approach works in practice.