Optimal expansion of competence sets with multilevel skills

The purpose of competence set expansion is to find an optimal expansion process at the minimal cost and then obtain the required competence set from the acquired competence set to solve a problem. Several models have been proposed to address the competence set expansion problem of only a single decision maker or multiple decision makers without considering multilevel skills. However, a practical competence set expansion model should involve multiple decision makers and multilevel skills. This study discusses an optimal expansion model of incorporating competence sets of group decision makers with multilevel skills. The proposed method not only obtains the optimal competence set expansion of all decision makers with the maximal total benefit but finds all optimal alternatives of the competence set expansion model. A cooperative alliance problem is solved to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed method.