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A consensus-based method for group decision making with incomplete uncertain linguistic preference relations

  • Methodologies and Application
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Abstract

In practical group decision-making (GDM) problems, it is nature for experts to express their preference relations in uncertain linguistic pattern, due to the ambiguity of the external environments and the internal nature of human judgments. In this paper, a consensus process is introduced to deal with GDM problems with incomplete uncertain linguistic preference relations (ULPRs). Firstly, a consistency level for ULPRs is defined. Secondly, a linear goal programming model is furnished to estimate the missing uncertain linguistic preference values with respect to consistency property. Thirdly, an additively consistent ULPR is constructed. What’s more, one can obtain the collective ULPR by aggregating individual additively consistent ULPRs, where the order-inducing variable is consistency level (CL), based on the thought of more importance will be given to the larger CL. Furthermore, a consensus reaching process is presented to make experts’ opinions achieve to a predefined level. In the end, a new algorithm is proposed to solve the GDM problem with incomplete ULPR, which is further applied to the selection of best cooperator in a water conservancy project.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (No. 71471056), the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71433003), sponsored by Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Business School, Hohai University, Nanjing, 211100, People’s Republic of China

    Yejun Xu, Ziqiang Zhang & Huimin Wang

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  1. Yejun Xu
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  2. Ziqiang Zhang
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  3. Huimin Wang
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Correspondence to Yejun Xu.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Communicated by V. Loia.

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Xu, Y., Zhang, Z. & Wang, H. A consensus-based method for group decision making with incomplete uncertain linguistic preference relations. Soft Comput 23, 669–682 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2982-z

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