Distance‐based multicriteria group decision‐making approach with probabilistic linguistic term sets

This study investigates problems of multicriteria group decision making (MCGDM) with PLTSs with a novel and rational comparison method and extended Techniques for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and TODIM methods are developed as decision support models to handle MCGDM problems.

Abstract

Abstract Probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) are an important expression for hesitant linguistic preference information under group decision‐making circumstances. This study investigates problems of multicriteria group decision making (MCGDM) with PLTSs. A novel and rational comparison method is first proposed, and two distance measures for PLTSs are defined. The weight of each criterion is then obtained via maximum deviation method. Subsequently, extended Techniques for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) ‐ VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje a Serbian name (VIKOR) and TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multiple attribute decision making) methods are developed as decision support models to handle MCGDM problems. An illustrative example is also analysed to demonstrate the rationality and feasibility of the proposed methods.