Multi-attribute group decision-making under probabilistic uncertain linguistic environment

• Published in: The Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 69; no. 2; pp. 157 - 170
• Main Authors: Lin, Mingwei, Xu, Zeshui, Zhai, Yuling, Yao, Zhiqiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis 01.02.2018; Taylor & Francis, Ltd
• Subjects: aggregation operators; Multi-attribute group decision-making; probabilistic uncertain linguistic term set; TOPSIS
• ISSN: 0160-5682; 1476-9360
• DOI: 10.1057/s41274-017-0182-y

Existing decision-making methods cannot work under the probabilistic uncertain linguistic environment where the decision makers give different uncertain linguistic terms as their assessments and the weights of assessments are different. In this paper, a novel concept called probabilistic uncertain linguistic term set is proposed, which is composed of some possible uncertain linguistic terms associated with the corresponding probabilities. Then, the normalization process, comparison method, basic operations, and aggregation operators are studied for probabilistic uncertain linguistic term sets. After that, an extended technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution method and an aggregation-based method are developed to rank the alternatives and then select the best one for multi-attribute group decision-making with probabilistic uncertain linguistic information. Finally, a practical case concerning the selection of Cloud storage services is shown to illustrate the applicability of probabilistic uncertain linguistic term sets.