Consistency and Consensus Driven for Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Decision Making with Pairwise Comparisons

TL;DR

This paper develops a new algorithm for group decision making using hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations, focusing on consistency and consensus, with proven convergence and practical applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel consistency index and consensus measurement for hesitant fuzzy linguistic preferences, along with procedures for improving decision reliability.

Findings

The proposed algorithms effectively improve consistency and consensus.

Experiments determine critical values for the consistency index.

A case study demonstrates practical application in venture capital evaluation.

Abstract

Hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relation (HFLPR) is of interest because it provides an efficient way for opinion expression under uncertainty. For enhancing the theory of decision making with HFLPR, the paper introduces an algorithm for group decision making with HFLPRs based on the acceptable consistency and consensus measurements, which involves (1) defining a hesitant fuzzy linguistic geometric consistency index (HFLGCI) and proposing a procedure for consistency checking and inconsistency improving for HFLPR; (2) measuring the group consensus based on the similarity between the original individual HFLPRs and the overall perfect HFLPR, then establishing a procedure for consensus ensuring including the determination of decision-makers weights. The convergence and monotonicity of the proposed two procedures have been proved. Some experiments are furtherly performed to investigate the critical values of the defined HFLGCI, and comparative analyses are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. A case concerning the performance evaluation of venture capital guiding funds is given to illustrate the availability of the proposed algorithm. As an application of our work, an online decision-making portal is finally provided for decision-makers to utilize the proposed algorithms to solve decision-making problems.