A flexible consensus scheme for multicriteria group decision making under linguistic assessments

The present paper proposes a flexible consensus scheme for group decision making, which allows one to obtain a consistent collective opinion, from information provided by each expert in terms of multigranular fuzzy estimates. It is based on a linguistic hierarchical model with multigranular sets of linguistic terms, and the choice of the most suitable set is a prerogative of each expert. From the human viewpoint, using such model is advantageous, since it permits each expert to utilize linguistic terms that reflect more adequately the level of uncertainty intrinsic to his evaluation. From the operational viewpoint, the advantage of using such model lies in the fact that it allows one to express the linguistic information in a unique domain, without losses of information, during the discussion process. The proposed consensus scheme supposes that the moderator can interfere in the discussion process in different ways. The intervention can be a request to any expert to update his opinion or can be the adjustment of the weight of each expert's opinion. An optimal adjustment can be achieved through the execution of an optimization procedure that searches for the weights that maximize a corresponding soft consensus index. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the presented consensus scheme, a technique for multicriteria analysis, based on fuzzy preference relation modeling, is utilized for solving a hypothetical enterprise strategy planning problem, generated with the use of the Balanced Scorecard methodology. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.