A consensus-based probabilistic linguistic gained and lost dominance score method

Abstract

This paper proposes a comprehensive Multiple Criteria Group Decision Making (MCGDM) method with probabilistic linguistic information based on a new consensus measure and a novel outranking method, Gained and Lost Dominance Score (GLDS). Firstly, new operations of the probabilistic linguistic term sets are introduced based on the adjusted rules of probabilistic linguistic term sets and the linguistic scale functions for semantics of linguistic terms. After defining a new consensus measure based on the correlation degree between probabilistic linguistic term sets, we develop a consensus reaching method to improve the consensus degree of a group. To rank alternatives reasonably, we further propose the GLDS method which considers both the “group utility” and the “individual regret” values. The core of the GLDS is to calculate the gained and lost dominance scores that the optimal solution dominates all other alternatives in terms of the net gained dominance flow and the net lost dominance flow. Then, we integrate the GLDS ranking method with the consensus reaching process and develop a consensus-based PL-GLDS method to solve the MCGDM problems with probabilistic linguistic information. Finally, the proposed method is validated by a case study of selecting optimal green enterprises. Some comparative analyses are given to show the efficiency of the proposed method.