Incomplete linguistic q-rung orthopair fuzzy preference relations and their application to multi-criteria decision making

With the development of social and economic research, the judgements that people deal with are full of fuzziness and vagueness. It is convenient to use the linguistic q-rung orthopair fuzzy numbers to offer the qualitative uncertain information. Consequently, in this paper, we mainly study linguistic q-rung orthopair fuzzy preference relations (Lq-ROFPRs) and apply them to a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The multiplicative consistency of Lq-ROFPRs is first introduced, then a consistency-based model is established to derive the normalized linguistic q-rung orthopair fuzzy priority weight vector. The concept of acceptably multiplicative consistency is further defined, and an optimization model is formulated to repair the unacceptably multiplicative consistent Lq-ROFPR. To cope with the incomplete Lq-ROFPR, another programming model is built to ascertain the missing values. The weights of criteria are determined by constructing a possibility degree matrix. Subsequently, an MCDM problem with incomplete Lq-ROFPRs is considered and a step-by-step algorithm is put forward. Finally, the proposed method is applied to three examples, and the advantages of this new approach are also demonstrated.