Social network analysis based approach to group decision making problem with fuzzy preference relations

Abstract

There are plenty of researches on group decision making (GDM) problem and most of them assume that all the experts are independent. However, the social network connection is an important characteristic among experts, and should been taken into account in the GDM decision process. The social network analysis (SNA) is a rapidly developing technology to deal with the problem about social network connections. In this paper, we address GDM problem with fuzzy preference relations where the experts have directed social network connections. And we use in-degree and out-degree centrality indices in SNA to build the social characteristics of the experts. Then we utilize the importance induced ordered weighted averaging(I-IOWA) operator to aggregate all the individual fuzzy preference relations with social indices. Furthermore,we investigate the reciprocity, additive consistency and acceptable consistency properties about the obtained group fuzzy preference relations. A procedure of addressing GDM problem with fuzzy preference relations where the experts are within directed social network connections is developed. Moreover, we compare the results of the case where all the experts are independent and the case where all the experts are within directed social network connections. Some useful tips that affect final outranking result in the directed graphical social network connection are obtained. In the end, we summarize the main results of this paper and point out some research directions for future research.