A new social network driven consensus reaching process for multi-criteria group decision making with probabilistic linguistic information

Consensus reaching process (CRP) is very important for multi-criteria group decision making (MCGDM). Recently, social network driven CRP methods have been deeply investigated. However, these methods rarely considered knowledge levels of DMs. In fact, knowledge levels of DMs can decide the correctness of final decision result which play an important role in CRP. Therefore, this paper proposes knowledge degree to measure knowledge level of DM and develops a new social network driven CRP method for probabilistic linguistic MCGDM problems. Based on the similarity degree and knowledge degree, similarity degree-based social network (SDSN) and trust relationship-based social network (TRSN) are constructed successively. According to the constructed SDSN and TRSN, the proposed CRP method consists of two stages. In the first stage, pair-wise DMs in complementary social network adjust their evaluations. In the second stage, the evaluations of DMs who contribute less to group consensus are modified. To ensure that the group consensus index (GCI) is non-decreasing in the above two stages, the constructed programming models not only improve similarity degrees between DMs-to-adjust and reference DMs but also consider similarity degrees between DMs-to-adjust and other DMs. Finally, an investment selection example and comparison analyses demonstrate the applicability and advantages of the proposed method.