A group agreement-based approach for decision making in environmental issues

  • Authors:

  • Ivan Vrana;Jiří Vaníček;Pavel Kovář;Jiří Broek;Shady Aly

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculty of Economics and Management, Information Engineering, Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Kamycka 159, 16521 Prague 6, Czech Republic;Faculty of Economics and Management, Information Engineering, Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Kamycka 159, 16521 Prague 6, Czech Republic;Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, 16521 Prague, Czech Republic;Faculty of Economics and Management, Information Engineering, Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Kamycka 159, 16521 Prague 6, Czech Republic;Faculty of Economics and Management, Information Engineering, Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Kamycka 159, 16521 Prague 6, Czech Republic

  • Venue:
  • Environmental Modelling & Software
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

A decision-making process focusing on environmental issues is extremely complex because of the intricacy of the real-world systems. Such systems are subjected to many uncertain events, which make planning, modeling, and predicting performances and treatment inherently complicated. Typically, a decision-making process focusing on environmental problems is ill structured, uncertain, vague, and multidimensional and is often based on the opinions of experts with different viewpoints. A common problem is how to aggregate the opinions of experts, which might be diverse and sometimes even opposing. This paper presents a new method for aggregating experts' opinions and introduces a new aggregation operator MaxAgM, based on Shannon entropy, which maximizes the agreement of experts' opinions. Our method can be applied toward aggregating expert proposals that were expressed by crisp as well as fuzzy quantities to propose a binary solution or to estimate a numerical value of some parameter. A specialized software package MaxAgr was developed to optimize agreement drawn from experts' proposals. Application of the method and the software is illustrated in a case study on flood risk management.