A Consensus‐Reaching Approach to the Evaluation of Product Design Alternatives with Multiple Preference Structures

Abstract

With interdisciplinarity being an important characteristic of contemporary product design, the evaluation of design alternatives also involves multiple disciplines, and the evaluator group usually consists of evaluators from different fields and with obvious heterogeneous characteristics. To effectively satisfy the heterogeneous needs of evaluators and improve the credibility of evaluation results, the paper introduces a consensus-reaching approach that incorporates multiple preferences to the evaluation of product design alternatives. First, in order to obtain individual preference information, each evaluator is asked to evaluate all the design alternatives using a preference structure that he/she is familiar with. Second, we use a transfer function to uniform the evaluation information obtained from various preference structures into a complementary judgment matrix. Then, we use the Hybrid Weighted Averaging (HWA) operator weight determination model to aggregate the preference information and obtain the group preference information. Then, we measure the consensus degree between individual evaluators and the group using a consensus measurement method. After that, we use the feedback mechanism to instruct individual evaluators to modify their preferences until a consensus is achieved. We explain the application steps and the feasibility of this approach through the evaluation of the design alternatives of multichannel fluorescence immunochromatography analyzers (MFIAs).

A Novel Noncooperative Behavior Management Method for Multiattribute Large Group Decision-Making

“…Decision-making, which aims at identifying an ideal alternative based on the information described by decision-makers, is widely used in all aspects of modern life [ 1 – 3 ]. With the increase in the complexity of decision-making problems, many attributes relevant to decision-making problems have been explored [ 4 ].…”