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Group Travel

1. Motivation / Sources

After studying the case for an individual application to our system, we now turn our
attentions to the group phase, that is, find the best possible resort/hotel that best fits the
wishes of the group regarding each individual’s wanted location for their holidays. Another
factor that must be put into equation in this phase is that conflicts will arise from the
different opinions and/or tastes of each member of the group.
Thus the emphasis was in finding adequate literature that dealt with Group Decision
Support System (GDSS) in a multi-criteria environment preferably in theory for the purpose
of orientating our work in this stage of the project. The first task involved consulting papers
and/or other types of information (sites, etc…) that employed some kind of a Group
Decision Support System (GDSS).
After this stage several papers were considered, but we decided to base our
implementation of the Group Travel stage on two papers, namely Group Decision Making
and Hierarchical Modeling 1, Proceedings of the 12th MCDM Conference, Hagen,
Germany, Springer 1997 by Jablonsky and Lauber and Group Decision Making in
Multiple Criteria Environment: A case using the AHP in software selection 2,
European Journal of Operational Research, Volume 137, Issue 1, 16 February 2002, Pages
134-144 by Vincent S. Lai, Bo K. Wong and Waiman Cheung.

These documents were preferred to other ones due to the fact that these applied
AHP in the decision making process, which in principle allows considerable savings for the
future implementation phase of this project.
2. Hierarchical Structure

The structure of a Group Decision Support System (GDSS) adopted in Jablonsky et


1
Lauber used, as already mentioned, AHP as the main core of the decision making structure:

conflict
resolution

party to the party to the party to the


conflict 1 conflict 2 . . . conflict r

Criterion 1 Criterion 2 . . . Criterion k

Scenario 1 Scenario 2 . . . Scenario n

Fig 1 – The AHP structure adopted in Jablonsky et Lauber1

The proposed hierarchy presented here suggests a set of levels for which we will
give a brief description. The article assumes that there is a inherent conflict in the decision
making process, so it proposes that the Level 1 (or goal of the problem) must be an apparent
compromise between the members of group (that may have different weights in the final
decision). The paper later goes on to quantify this “compromise” into an index.
For our case however the goal of looking for a compromise between all is not
important, so the analytical study presented in the paper on how to reach a compromise
between the members wasn’t considered. So for this matter our goal is to find the
alternative, given each member’s weight in the decision process that best suits the group’s
wishes with no special care for conflict resolution (we assume that the AHP already
considers this implicitly in its implementation for group decision).
The remaining levels are relatively straightforward: Level 2 represents each
member’s view of the perfect location for their holidays (or Party to the Conflict in the
original structure), Level 3 the criteria (the same as in the individual Travel Selection) and
finally in Level 4 the alternatives available to choose from.
The relations between levels derived from the hierarchy can be converted into a
numerical form and interpreted as follows:

1 Level 2 - evaluation of the importance of the parties to the conflict with respect to
the given decision problem - weights of the parties to the conflict

1 Level 3 - evaluation of the importance of the criteria with respect to the individual
parties to the conflict - weights of the criteria
1 Level 4 - evaluation of the scenarios - local priorities (with respect to the given
criterion and the given decision maker) and global priorities (synthesized from the
local preferences) are the direct basis for the final decision (finding the consensus,
ordering of the scenarios, etc.).

The priorities of the scenarios/alternatives lead apparently in the typical case to the
different results when the parties to the conflict are taking into account individually. That is
the basic aim of the conflict resolution is to find such approach that will make it possible,
e.g. based on an interactive procedure, getting near the local priorities of a specified
majority of the parties to the conflict and in this way to reach a consensus in a "best"
scenario.

3. Proposed Procedure / Hierarchical Structure

In this step we will show the hierarchical structure for the Group Travel Selection,
according to the remarks made in previous step:

Group Decision

Member 1 Member 2 Member n

Price Location Quality

Alternative 1 Alternative 2 Alternative n

Fig.2 - Proposed Hierarchical Structure for Group Travel phase

In accordance with the presented hierarchical formulation for our case and the
proposed relations between levels, it is possible to use the analytic hierarchy approach
(AHP) developed by Saaty3. It is the well-known method based on structuring a decision
problem into a hierarchy and afterwards in deriving local priorities of the elements in the
particular levels of the hierarchy. The final step of the AHP consists in the synthesizing the
local priorities into global priorities of the elements on the lowest level of the hierarchy
4. AHP applied to GDSS: How to do it?

As stated before, the AHP algorithm is applied to our problem in very similar
conditions comparing to the individual travel selection: firstly the AHP is applied
individually then the prioritized alternatives for each member are put together in a table.
Secondly, the weight in the decision making process (again for each member) is
introduced into the problem by multiplying the final weights by its respective weight. And
thirdly the geometric mean is calculated for each of the possibilities, thus giving the
group’s ranking of preferred alternatives.
We will detail our procedure for the Group Travel phase on the following lines:

• STEP 1: INPUT DATA

In first notice, each one of the group’s members must fill in a text box, with
personal data as well as his/hers preferred location (remember that it can be a beach resort
or a country cottage for example) for their proposed vacations. Finally each member
designates its importance in the group decision (from 0 to 100, meaning 100 total decision
of for the group and that the sum of importances cannot be higher than 100). The data is
stored in database tables.

• STEP 2: INDIVIDUAL AHP

After this is done, the AHP is implemented in roughly the same way as in the
individual choice. The criteria remain the same: PRICE, QUALITY and LOCATION.
The only difference is in the matrix that relates the LOCATION criteria with the
alternatives offered. In this case, the matrix follows the type of LOCATION chosen by this
individual alone.
After this step the relative weights calculated in the matrixes are aggregated in a
small table, showing the preferences of each one.

• STEP 3: PASSING FROM INDIVIDUAL PRIORITIES TO GLOBAL


PRIORITIES

After the prioritizing of the alternatives is computed, we use the importance of each
member in the final decision by multiplying it by the composite hierarchal priorities
obtained for that member. Finally the geometric mean is calculated by averaging the
group’s individual response at each point of comparison to form a composite matrix, which
is then used to obtain the relative and composite weights in the usual manner.
5. Simulation of Group Travel phase

After the summarized explanation of the several steps in the Group Travel phase,
it’s time to explain it in a more detail manner by means of simulation. This will help the
reader to obtain more feel for the design proposed for this phase of the project.
The steps that will be the target of a more detailed description will be mainly STEP
3 due to extension of the previous AHP theory to group decision.

Let’s take for example that STEP 2 has been completed and the travel group is
composed by 5 individuals and 6 alternatives are being considered (the nature or number of
each the alternatives is not important for the model); each individual has prioritized each
one of the alternatives according to their wishes/desires for their traveling intentions. So
after this step, we must have reached a table with the ranking of the alternatives by each one
of its members:

Individual Member Member Member Member Member


weights of 1 2 3 4 5
scenarios

scenario 1 0.1208 0.2035 0.1674 0.1508 0.1871


scenario 2 0.1606 0.1586 0.1908 0.1301 0.1429

scenario 3 0.3596 0.2983 0.2718 0.2871 0.3012


scenario 4 0.2786 0.2245 0.2510 0.2018 0.2791

scenario 5 0.0548 0.0857 0.1069 0.1204 0.0291


scenario 6 0.0256 0.0294 0.0121 0.1098 0.0606

Fig 2 - Example table with prioritized alternatives by the group

Until this step AHP theory is the same as in the individual phase (all weights for
each member equal 1, etc…). For STEP 3 new we need to introduce the importance of
each one of participants in the group decision. Let’s say that the 5 members have the
following weights for deciding (remember that the sum of weights cannot surpass 100
according to Jablonsky and Lauber1).

Group Members Importance


Member 1 40
Member 2 20
Member 3 20
Member 4 10
Member 5 10
Total 100

Fig.3 – Decision weights for the group

Following Jablonsky(1) the prioritized weights are multiplied by the respective


importance of the corresponding member of the group. Thus follows:

Individual weights Member Member Member Member Member


of scenarios 1 2 3 4 5
accounted with
member's
importance
scenario 1 4,8320 4,0700 3,3480 1,5080 1,8710
scenario 2 6,4240 3,1720 3,8160 1,3010 1,4290
scenario 3 14,3840 5,9660 5,4360 2,8710 3,0120
scenario 4 11,1440 4,4900 5,0200 2,0180 2,7910
scenario 5 2,1920 1,7140 2,1380 1,2040 0,2910
scenario 6 1,0240 0,5880 0,2420 1,0980 0,6060
After the decision’s weights have been introduced, we have to achieve a ranking of
the alternatives listed to the group. This possible according to Lai(2) by applying a
geometric mean to the intermediate weights as

FALTA VERIFICAR A MEDIA GEOMETRICA !!!!! !!!!

Bibliography:

(1)
Jablonsky J., Lauber J., Group Decision Making and Hierarchical Modeling,
Proceedings of the 12th MCDM Conference, Hagen, Germany, Spring 1997
(2)
Vincent S. Lai, Bo K. Wong, Waiman Cheung, Group Decision Making in Multiple
Criteria Environment: A case using the AHP in software selection, European Journal of
Operational Research, Volume 137, Issue 1, 16 February 2002, Pages 134-144
(3)
Saaty, T.L. The Analytic Hierarchy Process, RWS Publications., Pittsburgh 1990

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