An Intelligent Multiattribute Group Decision-Making Approach With Preference Elicitation for Performance Evaluation

The concept of efficiency has always been and will continue to be important for competitive business environments where limited resources exist. Owing to the growing complexity of organizations and economy in general, this trend is expected to continue to remain a high priority for organizations. Continuous performance evaluations that utilize both qualitative and quantitative information play a significant role in sustaining efficient and effective business processes. Therefore, the literature offers a wide range of performance evaluation methodologies to assess the operational efficiency in various industries. Majority of these models, however, focus solely on quantitative criteria, avoiding the interrelations and dependencies between qualitative and quantitative measurements. Furthermore, these methodologies tend to utilize discrete and contemporary information eliminating historical performance data. With these motivations, this paper proposes an integrated approach combining fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), analytic network process (ANP), and artificial neural network (ANN) methodologies for performance evaluation. In the proposed model, DEMATEL and ANP methodologies are utilized in a group decision-making concept to obtain priorities of the evaluation criteria. Following this, an ANN model is designed and trained with historical performance data collected from the organization and the results of the fuzzy DEMATEL-ANP model. The outcomes include the relational data among the criteria and alternatives used in the model in addition to their relative rankings. A food industry case study is presented to demonstrate the steps of the proposed model.