A review on fuzzy preference modeling methods for group decision-making

With the rise of group decision-making and the increasingly complex decision-making environment, preference modeling for decision makers has become more and more important, and many preference modeling methods have emerged. Based on the fuzzy theory, researchers have proposed a large number of preference models to express the subjective uncertainty of decision makers. These methods based on fuzzy theory are collectively referred to as fuzzy preference modeling methods. The fuzzy sets preference model is the first practice of fuzzy theory used in the field of preference modeling, and it is still widely used by researchers until now. Subsequently, based on fuzzy theory, the researchers also proposed linguistic term sets and cloud model. These methods have different representation domains, and are applicable to different decision-making environment. In this paper we give a review of classical fuzzy preference modeling methods and its latest extensions and variants. After the presentation of comparative analyses on the existing methods, we figure out some current challenges and possible future development directions in the field of fuzzy preference modeling.