GRA-Based Dynamic Hybrid Multi-Attribute Three-Way Decision-Making for the Performance Evaluation of Elderly-Care Services

Abstract

As an important branch of modern decision-making theory, multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) plays an important role in various fields. Classic MADM methods can provide a ranking of alternatives, and decision-makers need to evaluate the level subjectively based on the ranking results. Because of the limitation of knowledge, this is likely to lead to potential individual losses. Three-way decision (3WD) theory has good classification ability. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic hybrid multi-attribute 3WD (MA3WD) model. First, a new scheme for constructing loss functions is proposed from the perspective of gray relational analysis (GRA), which is an accurate and objective way to describe the relationship between loss functions and attribute values. Then, conditional probabilities are determined by employing the gray relational analysis technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (GRA-TOPSIS). With these discussions, a GRA-based hybrid MA3WD model for a single period is proposed by considering multi-source information. Furthermore, by extending the single-period scenario to a multi-period one, we construct a dynamic hybrid MA3WD model, which can obtain the final three-way decision rules as well as the results of each period and each attribute. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the case of performance evaluation of elderly-care services to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, and comparative analyses are given to verify the superiority of the proposed method.

Keywords

• three-way decision
• dynamic multi-attribute decision-making
• gray relational analysis
• performance evaluation
• elderly-care services