Group decision-making approach for evaluating the sustainability of constructed wetlands with probabilistic linguistic preference relations

Abstract Industrialisation and urbanisation have led to the substantial decrease of natural wetlands. Thus, assessing the sustainability of artificial wetlands has become an important topic. Generally, people are more accustomed to using linguistic phrases to express preference information. In this case, utilising probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) is a good choice for information expression. Besides, decision makers (DMs) may prefer to construct preference matrices by comparing the pairwise alternatives. Accordingly, this study focuses on the probabilistic linguistic preference relations (PLPRs). The cosine similarity measure of PLTSs is first proposed. Thereafter, the consistency/consensus issues are discussed and a strategy based on trust degree is investigated to derive important degrees of experts. Then an optimisation model is developed to calculate the priority weights. The main novelty is the idea of maximising the similarity measure. Finally, an example of wetlands assessment is illustrated to verify the effectiveness and advantages of our approach.