A Dynamic Context-Aware Multiple Criteria Decision Making Model in Social Networks

The features of complexity and dynamism characterize a social network and its processes. A network node, to perform a decision-making process, will have to consider its personal knowledge and also the influences received from its surroundings. The relationships of each single node change over the time, according to the dynamic evolution of the social network, altering at each time the relations between decision's criteria and then the decision itself. The main aim of the proposed model is to apply analytical tools provided by the social network analysis to multiple criteria decision making processes, helping to better understand and to correctly model the decision-making process within a social network. The node's context-awareness, together with the time and the decision's context, plays a central role in the decision-making process, modifying the position, in a scale of importance and centrality, of a criterion with respect to each other, leading to decide one way rather than another one. Therefore, modeling the behavior of a node inside a social network, will help to understand the social network phenomena and community's behavior, in order to predict and analyze their strength and the new behavioral patterns that emerge from these processes.