Towards a web-based collaborative weighting method in project

For the purpose of a product design or a project in general, weighting a set of comparable criteria has been proven to be of utmost importance (e.g. weighting product functions in value analysis - VA -, and allocating a budget in a Design-To-Cost project). Moreover the weighting problem is related to basic properties in the field of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) through the notions of ordinal transitivity and rationality in the designers´ mind. How should designers or project agents decide in the presence of uncertainties and different preference logics in a quick and efficient way (reactivity)? One of the weighting methods currently used in VA studies and in MCDA practices (through AHP approaches for example) is the pairwise comparison method. Recent improvements have been made in this field for a practical use in projects, with Limayem´s work which permits to obtain more precise estimations in the presence of uncertainties (fuzzy logic and statistical approaches), to take into account several decision makers at a time without requiring them to master the whole expertise, and to provide them with hints to locate parts of their judgment which do not seem consistent with the main part in order to improve it. Such properties let us hope that it should be possible to propose a web-based collaborative decision making method based upon an asynchronous and remote mode. After a presentation of Limayem´s advances in the research on pairwise comparison, we describe a flexible framework of web-based vote protocols to yield a weight consensus.