Prioritized multi-criteria decision making based on preference relations

•The influences from priority relationships to weights of criteria are investigated.•Some weighted prioritized aggregation operators are developed.•How to solve prioritized multi-criteria decision making problems is discussed.•The preference relations in prioritized MCDM problems are explored.

There may exist priority relationships among criteria in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems. This kind of problems, which we focus on in this paper, are called prioritized MCDM ones. In order to aggregate the evaluation values of criteria for an alternative, we first develop some weighted prioritized aggregation operators based on triangular norms (t-norms) together with the weights of criteria by extending the prioritized aggregation operators proposed by Yager (Yager, R. R. (2004). Modeling prioritized multi-criteria decision making. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 34, 2396–2404). After discussing the influence of the concentration degrees of the evaluation values with respect to each criterion to the priority relationships, we further develop a method for handling the prioritized MCDM problems. Through a simple example, we validate that this method can be used in more wide situations than the existing prioritized MCDM methods. At length, the relationships between the weights associated with criteria and the preference relations among alternatives are explored, and then two quadratic programming models for determining weights based on multiplicative and fuzzy preference relations are developed.