A dynamically weight adjustment in the consensus reaching process for group decision-making with hesitant fuzzy preference relations

The consensus reaching process is a dynamic and iterative process for improving group's consensus level before making a final decision in group decision-making (GDM). As the experts will express their opinions under their own intellectual level from different aspects, it is natural that the experts’ weights should reflect their judgment information. This paper proposes a dynamic way to adjust weights of decision-makers (DMs) automatically when they are asked to give original judgment information for GDM problems, in which the DMs express their judgment information by hesitant fuzzy preference relations (HFPRs). Two indices, an individual consensus index of hesitant fuzzy preference relation (ICIHFPR) and a group consensus index of hesitant fuzzy preference relation (GCIHFPR), are introduced. Normalisation of HFPRs with different numbers of possible values is taken into consideration for better computation and comparison. An iterative consensus reaching algorithm is presented with DMs’ weighting vector changing in each consensus reaching process and the process terminates until both the ICIHFPR and GCIHFPR are controlled within predefined thresholds. Finally, an example is illustrated and comparative analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.