Consensual Group-AHPSort: Applying consensus to GAHPSort in sustainable development and industrial engineering

Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making (MCGDM) deals with the process of taking decisions among a number of decision makers who evaluate different alternatives on several criteria that may be conflicting. In such a type of problems conflicts may are not only related to the criteria but also with the decision makers that could result in unsatisfactory solutions because of disagreements or deadlocks to achieve a decision. To avoid these undesirable results, consensus processes have been applied to group decision. The application of MCGDM has been mainly focused on decision problems for ranking and choice alternatives but, similarly to multi-criteria decision making, other types of problems such as sorting and description can be formulated. Although, a few number of MCGDM-sorting models, comparing with ranking and choice ones, have been proposed their importance and impact is quite significant nowadays. Hence, our aim is to consider the recent proposal on Group-AHPSort that did not consider any disagreement measure across the sorting decision process and study how the use of consensus processes can avoid some misclassifications or disagreements among the group of decision makers taking part in the MCGDM problem. To illustrate our approach, a case study focusing on the sorting of five European Union countries according to their sustainable development performance regarding social issues will show the importance and utility of detecting and smoothing disagreements in Group-AHPSort.