An Analytic Approach to Group Decision Making with Uncertain Linguistic Preference Information

This paper proposes an approach to solve the group decision-making (GDM) problem, in which the information about the attribute weights are uncertain linguistic variables, the expert weights are numbers, and the uncertain multiple attributes provided by decision makers are represented in uncertain linguistic preference information. In order to compute collective ranking values of alternatives based on uncertain linguistic preference information, a new uncertain linguistic weighted aggregation (ULWA) operator and the formula of possibility for comparing two uncertain linguistic variables are defined. Thus, individual uncertain linguistic preferences can be aggregated into a collective preference and ranking of the alternatives or selection of the best alternative(s) is obtained based on the ULWA operator and the formula of possibility for comparing two uncertain linguistic variables. A numerical example is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach.