A trust-based large-scale group decision making consensus reaching framework for intercity railway public–private partnership model selection

• Published in: Neural computing & applications Vol. 34; no. 21; pp. 19091 - 19115
• Main Authors: Meng, Fanyong, Chen, Bicong, Wang, Zongrun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Springer London 01.11.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Clustering; Computational Biology/Bioinformatics; Computational Science and Engineering; Computer Science; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Decision making; Image Processing and Computer Vision; Interurban travel; Original Article; Partnerships; Probability and Statistics in Computer Science; Subgroups; Trustworthiness; Clustering; Large-scale group decision making; Public–private partnership; Trust consensus; Opinion consensus
• ISSN: 0941-0643; 1433-3058
• DOI: 10.1007/s00521-022-07462-4

Public–private partnership is a form of contract that the government regards private sectors as long-term partners in infrastructures and public services. With increasing intercity travel passengers, the intercity railway PPP projects have attracted more and more attention. The PPP model selection is a complex decision problem for PPP project construction. It usually requires many experts from different fields to be involved in project process, which belongs to a large-scale group decision making (LSGDM) problem. Therefore, a trust-based LSGDM consensus reaching framework is proposed for intercity railway PPP model selection. Firstly, this paper develops a new clustering algorithm by considering the direct trust relationship and the opinion deviation. Based on the trust value between experts within subgroups, a trust consensus model to obtain stable trust relationships is built. Then, the weights associated with experts and subgroups are calculated. Furthermore, minimum adjustment models for different opinion consensus levels are built to improve the opinion consensus of subgroups. Finally, Hangzhou-Shaoxing-Taizhou intercity railway PPP model selection problem is offered to show the effectiveness of the new approach, and comparative analysis is conducted.