Group decision making with hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations

Hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations (HFLPRs) can be used to describe hesitant judgments of decision makers (DMs). To further research the utilization of HFLPRs, this paper develops a new group decision making (GDM) method with HFLPRs. First, a consensus checking method is proposed to measure the consensus level of individual HFLPRs. Then, a definition of acceptable consensus is introduced. Furthermore, to help experts whose consensus levels are below a predefined threshold to revise their preferences, a consensus reaching procedure is developed, where the acceptable multiplicative consistency of the revised individual HFLPRs is guaranteed. After that, a step-by-step algorithm is developed to help us solve GDM problems with HFLPRs. An application example is implemented to indicate the utilization of our method and to compare with previous research. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.