Social network analysis and consensus reaching process-driven group decision making method with distributed linguistic information

In group decision making with social network analysis (SNA), determining the weights of experts and constructing the consensus-reaching process (CRP) are hot topics. With respect to the generation of weights of experts, this paper firstly develops a distributed linguistic trust propagation operator and a path order weighted averaging (POWA) operator to explore the trust propagation and aggregation between indirectly connected experts, and the weights of experts can be derived by using relative node in-degree centrality in a complete distributed linguistic trust relationship matrix. Then, three levels of consensus are proposed, in which the most inconsistent evaluation information in distributed linguistic trust decision-making matrices can be pinpointed. Subsequently, the distance between experts’ evaluation information and collective evaluation information is designed to be applied as the adjustment cost in CRP. Finally, a novel feedback mechanism supported by the minimum adjustment cost is activated until the group consensus degree reaches the predefined threshold. The novelties of this paper are as follows: (1) the proposed POWA considers the trust value as well as the propagation efficiency of trust path when aggregating the trust relationship in SNA; (2) the consensus reaching mechanism can gradually improve the value of group consensus degree by continuously adjusting the most inconsistent evaluation information.