A decision rule aggregation approach to multiple criteria group decision support

A system that aggregates case-based linguistic decision rules using a hybrid of the dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA) and the Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory of evidence is proposed for multiple criterion-multiple participant sorting. First, DRSA is employed to estimate decision makers' (DMs) preferences by deducing linguistic decision rules from representative case sets evaluated by different DMs. Next, DS theory is used to evaluate each alternative by aggregating the decision rules triggered by the DMs, thereby generating an overall decision recommendation for the alternative. The proposed method is demonstrated using a numerical example.