Comprehensive minimum cost models for large scale group decision making with consistent fuzzy preference relations

Abstract

Nowadays, society demands group decision making (GDM) problems that require the participation of a large number of experts, so-called large scale group decision making (LS-GDM) problems. Logically, the more experts are involved in the decision making process, the more common is the emergence of disagreements in the group. For this reason, consensus reaching processes (CRPs) are key in the resolution of these problems in order to smooth such disagreements in the group and reach consensual solutions. A CRP requires that experts are receptive to change their initial preferences, but demanding excessive changes could lead to deadlocks. The well-known minimum cost consensus (MCC) model allows to obtain an agreed solution by preserving experts’ preferences as much as possible. However, this MCC model only considers the distance among experts and collective opinion, which is not enough to guarantee a desired degree of consensus. To overcome this limitation, it was proposed comprehensive MCC models (CMCC) in which both consensus degree and distance are considered, and CMCC models deal with fuzzy preference relations (FPRs) for modeling experts’ opinions. However, these models are not efficient to deal with LS-GDM problems and the FPRs consistency is ignored in them. Therefore, this paper aims to propose new CMCC models focused on LS-GDM problems in which experts use FPRs whose consistency is taken into account in order to obtain reliable results. A case study is introduced to show the effectiveness of the proposed models.