Improving consistency based on regret theory: A multi-attribute group decision making method with linguistic distribution assessments

• Published in: Expert systems with applications 2023-07, Vol.221, p.119748, Article 119748
• Main Authors: Wang, Ying-Ming, Jia, Xiang, Song, Hui-Hui, Martínez, Luis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Linguistic distribution assessments; Multi-attribute group decision making; Preference relations; Regret theory; Weighting determination model
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2023.119748

Multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems widely exist in our daily life. In such problems, multiple decision makers (DMs) are involved and elicit their evaluations to assess a set of possible alternatives. Their complexity usually implies to deal with uncertain contexts and the use of linguistic preference modelling for the elicited assessments has been common. Linguistic distribution assessments (LDAs) applied to MAGDM, involving several linguistic terms associated with their symbolic proportions, have been effective to describe such assessments. However, to ensure a reasonable decision making result, the consistency of LDAs should be investigated and a corresponding MAGDM method proposed. This paper proposes a MAGDM method based on regret theory, not only to take the psychological behaviors of DMs into account, but also to reflect the consistency of assessments. Hence, the additive regret preference relation is firstly defined and then four algorithms are devised to improve the consistency of assessments. On this basis, two weighting determination models are built to calculate the weights of attributes and DMs respectively. Furthermore, alternatives can be ranked according to their overall synthetic values. The proposed MAGDM method is applied to an emergency assistance area selection problem and its result verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposal.