A new integrated methodology using modified Delphi-fuzzy AHP-PROMETHEE for Geospatial Business Intelligence selection

Geospatial Business Intelligence (Geospatial BI) is a system that combines multidimensional analysis and cartographic visualization. It plays an important role in decision making process for enterprises. Adopting such a comprehensive solution may result in the great investment decision for them, so great deal of attention should be given in the selection of the optimal system. As there are many impacting factors in the selection of Geospatial BI system, the same process is considered as a complex multi-criteria decision making problem. In this paper, we explore the application of an integrated methodology for the evaluation of various Geospatial BI alternatives. The proposed methodology integrates the three well-known decision-making techniques, namely Modified Delphi, fuzzy analytic hierarchical process (fuzzy-AHP), and preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE). In this respect, the modified Delphi is used to select the most impacting factors by a few decision-makers. The fuzzy-AHP is employed to analyze the structure of the problem and to obtain the weights of the qualitative and quantitative criteria, by incorporating the uncertainty values. Then, the PROMETHEE technique is used for optimal ranking of the alternative system choices. A step-by-step, numerical study is illustrated by using the proposed methodology on the decision making problem of a company that is faced to five Geospatial BI solutions. The results demonstrate that the proposed methodology can successfully accomplish our goal of this study.