Capturing attitudinal characteristics of decision-makers in group decision making: application to select policy recommendations to enhance supply chain resilience under COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

The impact of COVID-19 on the global outbreak of supply chain is enormous. It is crucial for governments to take policy recommendations to enhance the supply chain resilience to mitigate the negative impact of COVID-19. For such a major issue, it is a common occurrence that a large number of decision-makers (DMs) are invited to participate in the decision-making process so as to ensure the comprehensiveness and reliability of decision results. Since the attitudinal characteristics of DMs are important factors affecting decision results, this study focuses on capturing the attitudinal characteristics of DMs in the large-scale group decision making process. The capturing process combines the ordinal k-means clustering algorithm, gained and lost dominance score method and personalized quantifiers. To enable DMs to express their cognitions in depth, we use the probabilistic linguistic term set to express the evaluation information of DMs. A case study on selecting the optimal policy recommendation for improving the integration capability of supply chain is given to illustrate the applicability of the proposed process. The superiority of the proposed algorithm is highlighted through sensitive analysis and comparative analysis.