Consensus reaching for social network group decision making with ELICIT information: A perspective from the complex network

Consensus reaching is essential in group decision-making (GDM) since it can mitigate conflicts between expert opinions and promotes the further implementation of decision-making results. Meanwhile, interaction between experts commonly occurs within social networks and in practical GDM problems. Therefore, it neecessary to consider the trust relationship between experts and utilize it to facilitate the consensus-reaching process (CRP). However, most existing social network-based GDM studies mainly use local measures (e.g., degree centrality) to determine the importance of experts, which cannot reflect their actual influence on a global topological structure. To address this issue, we propose a novel consensus-reaching strategy from the perspective of complex network analysis. First, the Extended Comparative Linguistic Expressions with Symbolic Translation (ELICIT) is adopted to flexibly facilitate the expression of experts' uncertain evaluations. The hybrid centrality is then defined to determine the influence of experts in the social network by considering both node importance and edge weight. Since experts with greater influence have stronger information propagation capabilities, hybrid centrality is utilized to guide the CRP, which can better reflect information flows in the social network. Additionally, the BWM-CRITIC weighting method is developed to reflect the significance and relationship among criteria. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method by means of a case study on a sustainable supplier selection problem.