Standard and mean deviation methods for linguistic group decision making and their applications

This paper proposes two methods for multi-attribute decision making problems with linguistic information, in which the preference values take the form of linguistic variables. Based on the ideal that the attribute with a larger deviation value among alternatives should be assigned a large weight, two methods named standard deviation method and mean deviation method are proposed to determine the optimal weighting vector objectively under the assumption that attribute weights are completely unknown. Two numerical examples are examined using the proposed methods to show the advantages from the other methods. It is shown that the proposed methods are straightforward and no loss of information. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.