ABSTRACT
Addressing multicriteria decision problems in a fuzzy environment characterized by conflicting goals requires fast and flexible decision support tools that are easily adaptable to different problem situations. More often than not, decision makers desire to incorporate imprecise expert choices, judgments, preferences, and intuitions from relevant sources into their decision-making processes. For instance, in nurse scheduling, a decision maker may want to incorporate his or her choices, expert opinion from management, nurse preferences regarding shift allocation, and patient preferences (Mutingi and Mbohwa, 2014). In such problem contexts, decision makers desire to use judicious approaches to find a cautious trade-off between conflicting goals. This is common in a wide range of real-world problems such as vehicle routing (Shaffer, 1991; Tarantilis, Kiranoudis, and Vassiliadis, 2004), staff scheduling (Ernst et al., 2004), nurse scheduling (Topaloglu and Selim, 2010), and job shop scheduling (Sakawa and Kubota, 2000). Addressing ambiguity, imprecision, and uncertainties of conflicting management goals is highly desirable in such problem settings.
