Group decision-making method with trust-based weight and reliability parameters

Abstract

Recent studies on group decision-making (GDM) have highlighted the significance of the reliability parameter, which is considered to be the second critical parameter, after weight, of an information source. In practice, trust among decision makers (DMs) also should receive attention because of the interaction among DMs. Thus, in this study, we introduce trust as a third parameter and focus on differentiating among these three information parameters. First, we apply the generalized combination (GC) rule to extract and fuse individual information. Then, we implement the procedures of consensus measure and information selection based on similarity. Next, we adjust the selected inconsistent information using trust-based weight and reliability parameters to facilitate group consensus. During the consensus reaching process, the weight and reliability parameters are dynamically and differentially determined. Finally, the proposed method is summarized as a GDM framework. We introduce a case simulation study to verify the feasibility of the proposed method and conduct a numerical comparison and comparative discussion to demonstrate that the proposed method provides a fresh perspective on developing GDM with consensus. In particular, this framework is suitable for addressing GDM problems involving uncertainty in high-dimensional information with wide discrepancy.