A consistency-driven approach to construction of Z-number-valued pairwise comparison matrices

The notion of consistency is used to estimate the quality of preference knowledge and its stability for reliable evaluation of decision alternatives. It is well-known that a set of strict consistency conditions are used to keep the rationality of preference intensities between compared elements. These requirements are not achievable in the real situations when decision maker has limited rationality and partially reliable preferences. In this study, we propose an approach to deriving consistency-driven preference degrees for such kind of situations. A preference degree is described by a Z-number to reflect imprecision and partial reliability of preference knowledge. An optimization problem with Z-number valued variables is used to formulate design of consistent preferences. A real-world decision making problem is considered to illustrate application of the proposed method and conduct comparison with an existing technique.