An adaptive group decision making framework: Individual and local world opinion based opinion dynamics

Abstract

Opinion dynamics (OD) models, which simulate individuals’ opinion evolution process on social network to analyze the final state of opinion distribution in a group, usually differ from each other due to the differences in social network evolution rules and opinion evolution rules. However, most existing social network evolution rules and opinion evolution rules usually cannot characterize the comprehensive influence of key factors such as neighbors and opinion differences in social relationships. To fully consider the properties of social network evolution and improve the efficiency of consensus reaching process in group decision making, this paper introduces the concept of local world opinion derived from individuals’ common friends, and then proposes an individual and local world opinion-based OD model. In the proposed model, social network evolution is jointly determined by the distance between individual opinions and network structure similarity. The pair of individuals with the largest consensus improvement space are then suggested to adjust their opinions by using an adaptive individual opinion adjustment mechanism. Finally, detailed simulation results are provided to demonstrate the convergence of the proposed model and analyze different parameters’ effects on the stabilized time steps and the number of stable state opinion clusters.