A consensus and maximizing deviation based approach for multi-criteria group decision making under linguistic setting

In practical group decision making (GDM) problems adhere to uncertain and imprecise data, the decision makers may express their preferences using linguistic terms. The aim of this paper is to present a method to assist the consensus process and selection process of multi-criteria GDM (MCGDM) problem under linguistic setting. If the consensus level does not meet predefined requirements, an algorithm is provided to help the decision maker or moderator reach the consensus goal. Once the consensus reaching process is finished, the maximizing deviation method is used to derive the importance weights of the attributes. Then, the linguistic weighted arithmetic averaging (LWAA) operator of 2-tuple linguistic variables is used to obtain the overall assessment value of each alternative and the ranking order of all alternatives can be determined. Finally, one example of personal selection problem is given to show the use of the proposed method.