Group decision making based on multiplicative consistency and consensus of Pythagorean fuzzy preference relations

Pythagorean fuzzy sets (PFSs) become a useful tool to describe the complex cognition of decision makers (DMs). In this paper, Pythagorean fuzzy preference relations (PFPRs) whose elements are PFSs are used for group decision making (GDM). First, a novel multiplicative consistency of PFPRs is proposed. Then, a programming model is constructed to derive the priority weight vector of PFPRs. Then, an inconsistency-repairing method of PFPRs is designed. Moreover, a group consensus index to calculate the degrees of similarity among PFPRs is proposed and an iterative consensus reaching procedure with PFPRs is developed. By maximizing the group consensus level of PFPRs, a model is built to determine DMs' weights. Furthermore, a new GDM method based on PFPRs is proposed. Finally, we offer an example to illustrate the proposed GDM method and complete a comparative analysis. The proposed GDM method outperforms the existing GDM methods for GDM in Pythagorean fuzzy environments.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.