A consensus model for group decision making under interval type-2 fuzzy environment

Abstract

We propose a new consensus model for group decision making (GDM) problems, using an interval type-2 fuzzy environment. In our model, experts are asked to express their preferences using linguistic terms characterized by interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2 FSs), because these can provide decision makers with greater freedom to express the vagueness in real-life situations. Consensus and proximity measures based on the arithmetic operations of IT2 FSs are used simultaneously to guide the decision-making process. The majority of previous studies have taken into account only the importance of the experts in the aggregation process, which may give unreasonable results. Thus, we propose a new feedback mechanism that generates different advice strategies for experts according to their levels of importance. In general, experts with a lower level of importance require a larger number of suggestions to change their initial preferences. Finally, we investigate a numerical example and execute comparable models and ours, to demonstrate the performance of our proposed model. The results indicate that the proposed model provides greater insight into the GDM process.