Linguistic group decision making: Axiomatic distance and minimum cost consensus

A group consensus decision making based sustainable supplier selection method by combing DEMATEL and VIKOR

Sustainable supplier selection (SSS) plays an increasingly critical role in the stability and development of the organization with increasing environmental awareness. This article proposes a linguistic multiple attribute group decision-making method to select the appropriate sustainable supplier by combing Decision Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory(DEMATEL) and VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). To do that, a distribution linguistic based DEMATEL technique is developed to deal with the complexity in criteria of SSS. To eliminate the inconsistency among multiple decision-makers providing the preference information of evaluation criteria, a minimum adjusting cost feedback mechanism is utilized to reach group consensus. Therefore, the proposed weights obtaining method can not only deal with the subjectivity of evaluation criterion but also satisfy group decision-makers with different profits and backgrounds. Then, based on the evaluation matrices of supplier performance, it calculates the ranking of alternative suppliers by the VIKOR method. Hence, it can deal with the ambiguity of decision makers’ evaluation and provide the best solution for decision-makers, as a consequence, it makes the final evaluation result more feasible and operable. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of this method are verified based on the actual situation of ABC Company. This study proposed a linguistic multiple attribute group decision-making method to select the appropriate sustainable supplier by combing Decision Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory(DEMATEL) and VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). What’s more, the proposed method considered the group consensus reaching processes.

A novel linguistic decision-making method based on the voting model for large-scale linguistic decision making

The notable characteristic of large-scale linguistic decision-making problems is that there are so many decision makers who provide linguistic assessments by using fuzzy linguistic representation models. In real-world applications, fuzzy linguistic terms mean different things for different people, and linguistic assessments based on different linguistic representation models may be simultaneous in the same large-scale linguistic decision-making problems. To this end, a novel linguistic decision-making method based on the voting model is proposed in the paper to deal with multi-linguistic assessments provided by decision makers. In large-scale linguistic decision process, evaluation-based voting is defined and multi-linguistic decision matrix is designed to represent multi-linguistic assessments provided by decision makers by using different linguistic representation models, and properties of the decision matrix are analyzed to show that linguistic assessments based on different linguistic representation models can be simultaneously represented. Based on multi-linguistic decision matrix, a new linguistic decision-making framework is developed to deal with large-scale linguistic decision-making problems with multi-linguistic assessments, in which normalization of multi-linguistic decision matrix and trust degrees of linguistic terms are contained, and more important, based on trust degrees of linguistic terms and 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic aggregation operators, an uniform fusion method of multi-linguistic assessments is proposed to aggregate multi-linguistic assessments of large-scale linguistic decision-making problems. Finally, user experiences of shared bikes, which are a large-scale linguistic decision-making problem in real-world applications, are employed to show the new decision-making framework and the uniform fusion method of multi-linguistic assessments, and furthermore, compared with existing linguistic decision-making methods analyzed in the example, it seems that multi-linguistic decision matrix and the uniform fusion method are useful and effective tools to deal with large-scale linguistic decision-making problems with multi-linguistic assessments.