Consensus-based clustering under hesitant qualitative assessments

In this paper, we consider that agents judge the feasible alternatives through linguistic terms when they are confident in their opinions or linguistic expressions formed by several consecutive linguistic terms when they hesitate. In this context, we propose an agglomerative hierarchical clustering process where the clusters of agents are generated by using a distance-based consensus measure. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.