Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Consensus Decision-Making Methods In Different Decision Situations And Their Applications

With the rapid development of the social economy,group decision-making,as a mechanism for integrating views of decision-makers based on rules,plays an increasingly important role in solving realistic decision-making problems.As the decision-making environment becomes more and more complex,it is urgent to develop group consensus decision-making methods for problems involving multiple participants and complex backgrounds.How to further mine the evaluation information of decision-makers,how to improve the reliability of decision-making information,how to effectively identify and deal with conflicting outcomes,and how to obtain reasonable decision-making results with a lot of uncertain factors are the crucial points of group decision-making.Aiming to improve the rationality and accuracy of the group decision-making process,this paper explores hesitant fuzzy linguistic consensus decision-making methods under different decision-making situations.The specific research content is listed as follows:(1)The multi-attribute group decision-making method with hesitant multiplicative linguistic preference relation is studied.In realistic decisionmaking problems,due to the uncertainty of complex factors and the fuzzy thoughts of people,decision-makers prefer to flexibly express their opinions and judgements with natural language,which is more in accordance with people’s descriptive conventions.Hesitant multiplicative linguistic preference relation,which can effectively depict vague and imprecise expressions,becomes an ideal choice to depict the hesitancy of decision-makers.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the process of consistency checking and inconsistency improving for hesitant multiplicative linguistic preference relation.This paper first defines the perfectly consistent hesitant multiplicative linguistic preference relation and the acceptably consistent hesitant multiplicative linguistic preference relation,respectively.Then,this paper extends the eigenvector method into the hesitant multiplicative linguistic environment for consistency measurement and establishes the corresponding consistency improving algorithm with a correction parameter.Furthermore,by applying the dichotomy method during the adjustment process,this consistency improving algorithm can not only improve the accuracy of the consistency adjustment but also retain more original information.Based on the acceptably consistent hesitant multiplicative linguistic preference relations,this paper develops a group decision-making method,which can well represent the preference information of decision-makers when the decision data is insufficient and obtain more reasonable decision-making results.(2)The consensus decision-making methods that consider the psychological status of decision-makers are investigated.In the group decisionmaking methods,most of the existing research measures the consensus degree by the distance between individual opinions and the overall opinion.They just consider experts’ performances in the group instead of their individual consistency which is also vital to ensure the reasonability of decision-making results.Since an appropriate indicator to identify the consensus level of all decision-makers is needed to measure the availability of decision-making results,this paper utilizes a new concept of satisfaction degree combining the consistency index and the consensus level to measure the group consensus.Then,this paper establishes an optimization model to handily and rapidly exploit out the evaluations that should be reconsidered by decision-makers with possibly retaining the original information.With the support of the proposed optimization model,this paper develops a trust-recommendation mechanism,which fully considers the psychological demands of decision-makers and increases the willingness of experts to change their original opinions.Furthermore,as research on behavioral economics and psychology shows that regret directly and significantly affects people’s choices,this paper enriches the theoretical framework in the consensus reaching process by introducing a regret-based method.A non-consensus degree of a group is proposed as an indicator to measure group consensus and a feedback mechanism with an optimization model is developed to generate advice for decision-makers.This feedback mechanism allows decision-makers to adjust decision matrices within an acceptable range based on advice,which respects each decision maker’s opinions and allows situations where group consensus cannot be reached.In summary,such methods consider the ambiguity of evaluation information as well as the psychological status of decision-makers.This both improves the reliability of the consensus reaching process and the adaptability of the decisionmaking results,and provides a more comprehensive analysis of the decisionmaking problem.(3)An multi-attribute group decision-making method based on the“individual-group” perspective is studied.Considering the complexity and uncertainty of the criteria,it is often difficult for decision-makers to provide valuable evaluation information in some unfamiliar areas.Thus,this paper allows decision-makers to establish individual sets of criteria and then evaluate alternatives under their selected criteria.Then,this paper extends the SimosRoy-Figueira(SRF)method into the hesitant fuzzy linguistic environment,which ensures that criteria weights can be precisely measured according to decision makers’ preferences.With the advantages in simplification and reducing information loss,this paper introduces the ELECTRE III method(ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalit-ELimination and Choice Expressing the REality)to assist the selection of optimal treatment plan for each decision-maker.For some uncontrollable factors in practice and different considerations of decision-makers,it is hard to get a consistent ranking of alternatives directly.In such cases,this paper proposes a consensus method based on Kendall distance that focuses on minimizing the change from a ranking into another one.Some analyses and discussions have been provided to illustrate the strong applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method.(4)The applications of the proposed methods are discussed.This paper selects suitable decision-making problems in different decision-making situations,and applies the theoretical research results to solve problems of the site selection for earthquake shelters,the selection of a medical emergency response plan,the selection of an investment project,and the selection of a treatment plan based on physician-patient consensus.Through the comparative analysis with the existing decision-making methods,it further illustrates the reliability and practicality of the consensus decision-making method with hesitating fuzzy linguistic information.The above work can enrich the framework of group consensus decisionmaking,and provide theoretical guidance and decision support for effectively solving realistic decision-making problems,which not only shows important theoretical value but also has broad application prospects.