Consistency improvement under incomplete hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations in large-scale group decision-making

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Fan, Jianping | Yuan, Jiu | Wu, Meiqin^{; *}

Affiliations: School of Economics and Management, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Meiqin Wu, School of Economics and Management, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China. E-mail: wmq80@sxu.edu.cn.

Abstract: This paper studies a large-scale group decision-making method (LSGMD) based on incomplete hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations (IHFLPRs) and proposes an improved model for additive consistency of hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations (HFLPRs). Additionally, consistency control and fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering are utilized to enhance efficiency and reliability. Firstly, a model is proposed to address the issues of missing elements in IHFLPRs and insufficient additive consistency in HFLPRs, aiming to more accurately reflect decision makers’ preference relationships towards candidate alternatives. Subsequently, the FCM method is employed to cluster decision experts’ preference information and obtain the overall preference information. Finally, the rationality and accuracy of our proposed method are demonstrated through a case study and comparative analysis.

Keywords: Incomplete hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations, consistency control, large-scale group decision making, Fuzzy C-means clustering

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-232615

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 6825-6836, 2023