An Uncertain Linguistic Multi-criteria Group Decision-Making Method Based on a Cloud Model

• Published in: Group decision and negotiation Vol. 24; no. 1; pp. 171 - 192
• Main Authors: Wang, Jian-qiang, Peng, Juan-juan, Zhang, Hong-yu, Liu, Tao, Chen, Xiao-hong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.01.2015; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Analysis; Biological and Physical Anthropology; Business and Management; Certainty; Decision Making; Deviation; Fuzzy sets; Group decision making; Group integration; Linguistics; Methods; Preferences; Studies; Values; Uncertainty linguistic; Cloud model; Multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM); Interval integrated cloud
• ISSN: 0926-2644; 1572-9907
• DOI: 10.1007/s10726-014-9385-7

In this paper, a decision-making method based on a cloud model is proposed in order to solve multi-criteria group decision-making problems in the situations where the criteria weights are known completely, but the decision-makers’ weights are unknown and the criteria values are interval linguistic variables. In the proposed method, the interval linguistic values are firstly converted into interval integrated clouds, and the preference aggregation is executed by means of generating floating clouds. Then the decision-makers’ weights are obtained by calculating the ‘uncertainty’ and ‘deviation’ degrees of the decision-makers, and the distances between alternatives are assessed by using the Hamming distance. Finally the ranking of all alternatives is determined by the corresponding distances. An example to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method is provided together with a comparison with some existing methods.