A review of soft consensus models in a fuzzy environment

In the consensus reaching processes developed in group decision making problems we need to measure the closeness among experts' opinions in order to obtain a consensus degree. As it is known, to achieve a full and unanimous consensus is often not reachable in practice. An alternative approach is to use softer consensus measures, which reflect better all possible partial agreements, guiding the consensus process until high agreement is achieved among individuals. Consensus models based on soft consensus measures have been widely used because these measures represent better the human perception of the essence of consensus. This paper presents an overview of consensus models based on soft consensus measures, showing the pioneering and prominent papers, the main existing approaches and the new trends and challenges. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.