Multi-attribute group decision making with aspirations: A case study

• Integrated aspiration into the Utility Theory for multi-attribute group decision making.
• Developed six types of utility functions to capture utility changes with different forms of information.
• Offered a case study to illustrate how to conduct a MAGDM with decision maker’s aspirations.

It is common that a decision maker′s utility depends on the degree to which the attribute performance matches the aspiration. However, aspiration is not considered in the traditional multi-attribute decision making (MADM) approaches. Using the Strategic Freight Forwarder Selection of China Southern Airlines (CSA) as a backdrop, this study proposes an integrated MADM approach for problems with consideration of decision maker’s aspirations. By solving the case problem of CAS, the proposed approach demonstrates its superiority. It helps managers make more robust and reliable decisions and also provides managers with a coefficient to help them readily check the group consensus. In addition, the approach can accommodate complex decision data, such as numerical values, interval numbers, linguistic terms and uncertain linguistic terms.