Abstract
Social trust network (STN) and minimum cost consensus (MCC) models have been widely used to address consensus issues in multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problems with limited resources. However, most researchers have overlooked the decision maker ‘(DMs)’ confidence levels (CLs) and adjustment willingness implicit in their evaluations. To address these problems, this paper explores a confidence-based MCC model that considers DMs’ adjustment willingness in the STN. The proposed model includes several modifications to the traditional trust propagation and consensus optimization models. Firstly, the improved method for measuring CLs of DMs and the confidence-based normalization approach are defined, respectively. Secondly, the bounded trust propagation operator is proposed, which considers the credibility of mediators to complete the STN. Thirdly, the identification rules based on the consensus index and CL are defined, and the MCC model with personalized cost functions and acceptable adjustment thresholds is built to automatically generate adjustment values for non-consensus DMs. Finally, a model to identify the non-cooperative behavior at the element level is established and the hybrid MCC model with persuasion strategies is provided. Finally, a case study is processed to verify the applicability of the proposed model, and comparison and sensitivity analysis are conducted to highlight its benefits.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the referees for their help to improve the quality of the paper. This work has been supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), under grants Nos. 72101168, 72071135.
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Ling Pan is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China. She is very interested in decision theory and method. Her main research interests include multi-attribute group decision making, uncertain decision making, consensus optimization model, etc.
Zeshui Xu (Fellow, IEEE) (M’08-SM’09-F’19) was a Distinguished Young Scholar of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chang Jiang Scholar of the Ministry of Education of China. He is currently a Chair Professor with the Business School, Sichuan University. He has been elected as Academician of IASCYS (International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences), Fellow of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Fellow of IFSA (International Fuzzy Systems Association), Fellow of RSA (Royal Society of Arts), Fellow of IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology), Fellow of BCS (British Computer Society). He has contributed more than 600 SCI/SSCI articles, and is among the world’s top 1% most highly cited researchers with about 60,000 citations, his h-index is 123. He is the Associate Editors of IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, Information Sciences, etc. His research interests include decision making, big data analytics, fuzzy systems, etc.
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Pan, L., Xu, Z. A Confidence-based Consensus Model for Multi-Attribute Group Decision Making: Exploring the Bounded Trust Propagation and Personalized Adjustment Willingness. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 32, 483–513 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-023-5570-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-023-5570-z