An efficient consensus reaching framework for large-scale social network group decision making and its application in urban resettlement

Abstract

Urban resettlement projects involve a large number of stakeholders and impose tremendous cost. Developing resettlement plans and reaching an agreement amongst stakeholders about resettlement plans at a reasonable cost are some of the key issues in urban resettlement. From this perspective, urban resettlement is a typical large-scale group decision-making (GDM) problem, which is challenging because of the scale of participants and the requirement of high consensus levels. Observing that residents who are affected by a resettlement project often have tight social connections, this study proposes a framework to improve the consensus reaching and uses the minimum consensus cost to reduce the total cost for urban resettlement projects with more than 1000 participants. Firstly, we construct a network topology that consists of two layers to deal with incomplete social relationships amongst large-scale participants. An inner layer consists of participants whose preference similarities and trust relations are known. Meanwhile, an outside layer includes participants whose trust relations cannot be determined. Secondly, we develop a classification method to classify participants into small subgroups based on their preference similarities. We can then connect the participants whose trust relations are unknown (the outside layer) with the ones in the inner layer using the classification results. To facilitate effective consensus reaching in large-scale social network GDM, we develop a three-step approach to reconcile conflicting preferences and accelerate the consensus process at the minimum cost. A real-life urban resettlement example is used to validate the proposed approach. Results show that the proposed approach can reduce the total consensus cost compared with the other two practices used in the actual urban resettlement operations.