آنالیز رویکردهای DEMATEL برای رسیدگی به تعامل معیارها داخل فرایند تحلیل سلسله مراتبی ANP

ABSTRACT An analysis of DEMATEL approaches for criteria interaction handling within ANP

Decision making is a ubiquitous human activity that occurs in life of every individual very often. People generally confront with decision situations in their social, personal or professional lives in which two or more alternatives are present. Generally, daily life problems . ri are degraded into mono-criterion and outcomes are calculated intuitively. However, choosing the best alternative among the set of options considering multiple, incommensurate and contradictory criteria exceeds cognitive limitations of decision makers and becomes a complicated issue. Making right decisions against complex problems yields significant influences on the future of individuals or groups. Multiple-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) deals with such complex problems with multiple and conflicting criteria. Many state of art methods are proposed in the literature for modeling and solving MADM problems such as Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) (Saaty, 1980), Analytical Network Process (ANP) (Saaty, 1996), Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) (Hwang & Yoon, 1981), Elimination et Choice Translating Reality (ELECTRE) (Roy, 1990), VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje tech-nique (VIKOR) (Opricovic & Tzeng, 2004), Conjoint Analysis (Krantz, 1964; Verma & Pullman, 1998) etc. However, majority of the MADM methods assume that the criteria are independent of each other, which is not a realistic assumption in many real world problems (Baykasoglu, Kaplanoglu, Durmusoglu, & Sahin, 2013). Several forms of interactions among criteria might occur in real life problems so that more sophisticated/intelligent techniques are required to deal with particular needs of the problem under consideration. Unfortunately, the criteria interaction concept is very little issued in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, there is not any comprehensive study, encompassing different methodologies capable of handling criteria interactions, and their discussions in the literature. Only re-views of specific methods are available such as ANP. Separated studies in this field hinder us from drawing a comprehensive portray of the available tools and methods for modeling criteria interactions. In recent years, many model developments in the field of decision analysis are observed incorporating criteria interactions. One of the rapidly evolving areas is the hybridization of several techniques to overcome the restrictive assumptions such as criteria independence. Probably, hybrid techniques of Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) (Fontela & Gabus, 1976) and ANP possess the fastest growing number of papers. Despite the increasing number of applications, different ways of hybridization of DEMATEL and ANP are not well known. This is mainly due to the significant number of papers in the literature, which increases complexity and requires time consuming analysis. In this paper, DEMATEL method, which is attracting many researchers in the field of decision analysis in recent years, and its hybridizations with ANP are thoroughly analyzed, and published papers are reviewed in detail. We also depict the classification of interaction terms, which clarifies the positions of the analyzed methods among the big universe of available methodologies. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 a bird’s eye view of criteria interaction phenomenon in MADM is given; in Section 3 the hybrid DEMATEL and ANP methods are explained with the illustrative examples and related literature reviews are given; in Section 4 bibliometric analysis of the papers is given; finally paper concludes in Section 5. Also the overview and main steps of the ANP and DEMATEL methods are given in Appendix A and B respectively.