Grey Models for Decision Making

Abstract

Deciding on what actions to take based on the actual circumstances and pre-determined goals is known as decision making. The essential meaning of decision-making is to make a decision or to choose a course of actions. Decision-making not only plays an important part of various kinds of management activities, but also appears throughout every person’s daily life. The understanding of the concept of decision-making can be divided into two categories: general and specific. In the general category, each decision-making stands for the entire process of activities, including posting questions, collecting the data, establishing the goal, making, analyzing, and evaluating the plan of action, implementing the plan, looking back, and modifying the plan. In the specific category, decision-making only represents the step of choosing a specific plan of action out of the entire decision-making process. Also, some scholars understand decision-making as choosing and picking a plan of action under uncertain conditions. In this case, the choice can be most likely influenced by the decision maker’s prior experience, attitude, and willingness to take a certain amount of risk. Grey decision-making is about making decision using such decision models that involve grey elements or combine the general decision model and grey systems models. Its focus of study is on the problem of choosing a specific plan.