Group Decision Making with Linguistic Distribution Preference Relations: An Interval Numerical Scale-Based Approach

Abstract

Group decision making (GDM) has become a common scenario in actual life, and the linguistic distribution preference relation (LDPR) is quite useful for experts to make comparisons by using linguistic distribution assessments in practical GDM problems. In this paper, by considering the personalized individual semantics (PIS) of experts, an approach to GDM with LDPRs is proposed. First, an optimization model is developed to determine interval numerical scales of linguistic terms for each expert by considering the consistency of an LDPR. Then, an LDPR is converted to an interval fuzzy preference relation, based on which a procedure for GDM problems with LDPRs is pesented. Eventually, we use an example to show the applicability of the GDM approach.