Multi-attribute group decision making with opinion dynamics based on social trust network

Abstract

Social trust network (STN) has facilitated information exchange between experts during interactions. Some feedback mechanisms have been used to provide advices for opinion change to improve their consensus levels. However, they do not consider the experts’ willingness and their self-confidence values. To analyze the influence of the relationship between experts on the decision-making results, this paper proposes a multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) with opinion dynamics based on STN. Three stages are included in the proposed approach: trust propagation, consensus reaching process and alternative selection. In the trust propagation stage, the social weight influence matrix and the weights of experts are obtained based on the complete social trust matrix which is constructed by trust aggregation and the given self-confidence values of experts. In the consensus reaching process, the consensus measure is used to determine the consensus between the experts or not, and the feedback mechanism based on opinion dynamics is used to adjust the opinions which do not reach consensus. The appropriate alternative is selected based on the assessable value of the alternative in the selection process. Finally, a numerical experiment about supplier selection is introduced to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach and comparison analyses show that the proposed approach can improve efficiency compared with the MAGDM in the social network.