An adaptive consensus method for multi-attribute group decision making under uncertain linguistic environment

For a multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problem, the so-called consensus reaching process is used to achieve an agreement among experts and finally make a common decision. Unfortunately, so far the consensus models for MAGDM haven’t been completely studied, especially for MAGDM under uncertain linguistic environment. The disadvantages of most existing consensus models could be summarized into 3 aspects. (1) In most existing consensus models, all the experts’ opinions are weighted equally important, and/or all the experts’ weights are treated statically. (2) Most of the interactive consensus methods are lack of effective feedback mechanism, while the automatic ones also have some defects, such as the lack of pertinence in adjustment process and the inability to reflect the subjective opinions of experts. (3) Also the comparison methods for uncertain linguistic variables therein are far from perfect, which require either complicated computing process or may cause non-distinguishable cases. In order to solve the above problems and obtain final decision results more efficiently, an interactive method with adaptive experts’ weights and explicit guidance rules for MAGDM under uncertain linguistic environment is developed. Our contributions can be summarized as follows. (1) Based on the definitions of closeness and consensus indices, a non-linear programming model is constructed to dynamically adjust the experts’ weights by maximizing the group consensus. (2) A targeted feedback mechanism including identification rules and recommendation rules is designed to guide the experts to modify their opinions more precisely and effectively. (3) A more appropriate method for comparing uncertain linguistic variables named dominance index is proposed, which can simplify the calculation process significantly. Finally, an illustrative example proves that the proposed consensus method is feasible and effective, and a detailed comparison and analysis highlights the advantages and characteristics of this method. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.