MULTI-ATTRIBUTE GROUP DECISION MAKING CONSIDERING DIFFERENCE IN EXPERTS KNOWLEDGE: AN EXCEL APPLICATION

The investigated problem deals with selection of business intelligence software represented as multi-attribute group decision making problem. A group of experts with different experience and knowledge is involved to evaluate the features of the software and make the selection. The major challenge is to aggregate different points of view of experts to determine the optimal choice from given set of software alternatives. For the goal, a modification of simple additive weighting method is proposed. In contrast to classical simple additive weighting approach the new utility function takes into account also importance of experts' points of view. The described approach is implemented in MS Excel environment for real problem of business-intelligence software selection. Three different levels of knowledge and experience of group members are considered. The numerical results show that optimal choice is influenced by importance of experts' evaluations expressed by corresponding weighted coefficients. This proves the effectiveness of proposed approach for group decision making in real life applications.