Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / David Ben-Arieh / Group decision-making is an essential activity is many domains such as financial,
engineering, and medical fields. Group decision-making basically solicits opinions from
experts and combines these judgments into a coherent group decision. Experts typically
express their opinion in many different formats belonging to two categories: quantitative
evaluations and qualitative ones. Many times experts cannot express judgment in
accurate numerical terms and use linguistic labels or fuzzy preferences. The use of
linguistic labels makes expert judgment more reliable and informative for decisionmaking.
In this research, a new linguistic label fusion operator has been developed. The operator
helps mapping one set of linguistic labels into another. This gives decision makers more
freedom to choose their own linguistic preference labels with different granularities
and/or associated membership functions.
Three new consensus measure methods have been developed for group decision making
problem in this research. One is a Markov chain based consensus measure method, the
other is order based, and the last one is a similarity based consensus measure approach.
Also, in this research, the author extended the concept of Ordered Weighted Average
(OWA) into a fuzzy linguistic OWA (FLOWA). This aggregation operator is more
detailed and includes more information about the aggregate than existing direct methods.
After measuring the current consensus, we provide a method for experts to modify their
evaluations to improve the consensus level. A cost based analysis gives the least cost
suggestion for this modification, and generates a least cost of group consensus. In addition, in this research I developed an optimization method to maximize two types
of consensus under a budget constraint.
Finally considering utilization of the consensus provides a practical recommendation to
the desired level of consensus, considering its cost benefits.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/68 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Chen, Zhifeng |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | 1291088 bytes, application/pdf |
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