Approaches to decision making with linguistic preference relations based on additive consistency

The linguistic preference relation (LPR) is introduced to efficiently deal with situations in which the decision makers (DMs) provide their preference information by using linguistic labels over paired comparisons of alternatives. However, the lack of consistency in decision making with LPRs can lead to inconsistent conclusions. In this paper, two new decision making methods are developed to improve the additive consistency of LPRs until they are acceptable, and eventually obtain the reliable decision making results. First, the new concepts of order consistency and additive consistency of LPRs are introduced, and followed by a discussion of the characterization about additive consistent LPRs. Then, a consistency index is defined to measure whether an LPR is of acceptable additive consistency. For an unacceptable additive consistent LPR, two automatic iterative algorithms are further proposed to help DMs improve additive consistency level until it is acceptable. In addition, the proposed algorithms can derive the priority weight vector from LPRs and obtain the ranking of the alternatives. Finally, the proposed methods are applied to an emergency operating center (EOC) selection problem. The comparative analysis demonstrates the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methods. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.