Framework of Group Decision Making With Intuitionistic Fuzzy Preference Information

Group decision making is an essential activity in various fields of operations research and management science. This paper focuses on the intuitionistic fuzzy group decision making problem in which all the experts use the intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations (IFPRs) to express their preferences. To start our discussion, we first propose the novel framework of intuitionistic fuzzy group decision making and clarify the difficulties in deriving the final result which is accepted by all individuals in the group. Next, a consistency checking method, which is based on the multiplicative consistency, is developed to check the consistency of each IFPR furnished by the group of experts. For those IFPRs that do not have the acceptable consistency, an iterative procedure is proposed to improve the consistency. Furthermore, after introducing a novel consensus measure, an interesting consensus-reaching procedure is developed to help the group to find a solution which is accepted by most members in the group. Finally, in order to make our approaches more applicable, a step-by-step algorithm is given. A numerical example concerning the selection of outstanding Ph.D. students for the China Scholarship Council is given to illustrate and validate the proposed approaches.