Limited budget-based consensus model for large group decision making with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information

Abstract

Considering the uncertainty of large group decision-making and the limitation of resources, this paper constructs a large group decision-making method with hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) based on limited budget. Firstly, by studying the basic theory of HFLTS, a weighted aggregation model of HFLTS is proposed, which can ensure the minimum weighted distance between aggregated HFLTS and HFLTSs before aggregation. Secondly, a decision makers’ weight determination algorithm is proposed by considering the quality of trust sources in the social trust network, which is calculated by the LeaderRank centrality measure. Furthermore, a maximum group consensus level model (MGCM) based on limited budget is constructed, in which the adjustment cost of decision makers is determined by the hesitancy degree in the evaluation and trust out-degree. For the situation of insufficient budget, the order correlation between the alternatives’ ranking before and after the budget increase is introduced to judge whether to increase the budget to achieve a higher group consensus level. Then, a limited budget-based large group decision-making method with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information is proposed. And this method is applied to the selection of equipment suppliers for hydrogen refueling station. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparison with existing research methods and sensitivity analysis.