Dynamic Linguistic Preference Relations and Their Use in Multi-Period Decision Making

Linguistic preference relations are constantly used by decision maker to express his/her preference information over alternatives in fuzzy environment where the decision maker´ preference information can not be assessed precisely in a quantitative form but may be in a qualitative one. Over the last decades, many research results both theoretically and practically have been reported on linguistic preference relations, but current research mainly focuses on the situations where all the linguistic preference relations are collected from the same period, in which time is not taken into account. In this paper, we consider the decision making problems where the decision maker provides individual linguistic preference relations at different periods. We first introduce the concept of dynamic linguistic preference relation, and discuss some results related to dynamic linguistic preference relations and their aggregation technique. Then we develop an approach to multi-period decision making based on linguistic preference relations, and finally, we illustrate in detail the approach with a practical example.