Group decision making based on acceptable multiplicative consistency and consensus of hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations

Abstract In this paper, we propose a new group decision making (GDM) method based on the acceptable multiplicative consistency and consensus of hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations (HFLPRs). First, an approach for improving the consistency of HFLPRs is proposed to generate an acceptable multiplicative consistent HFLPR. Then, a consensus index of HFLPRs is defined and an optimization model is presented to meet an acceptable consensus requirement under the premise of the acceptable multiplicative consistency and the smallest information loss, where it yields adjusted HFLPRs with an acceptable consistency and consensus. Then, the weights of decision makers (DMs) are calculated based on the obtained adjusted HFLPRs. Moreover, we propose a new GDM method based on HFLPRs. Finally, the proposed GDM method is illustrated by an application example and comparative analyses are conducted to show the performance and the superiority of the proposed GDM method.