An enhanced consensus reaching process in group decision making with intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations

Group decision making (GDM) with intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations (IFPRs) has been an important and active research topic recently, in which one of the most challenging issues is how to reach the group consensus so as to get the best decision. As the uniform consensus is often unachievable in practice, in order to achieve the consensus, the existing method needs to remove the experts with the most different opinions from the decision group. It has two drawbacks: the first is the loss of the valuable judgments and opinions of the removed experts. This is especially harmful in practice where most experts or decision makers often have the biased knowledge in the sense of in-depth expertise in some aspects and naive views in other aspects. The second is demotivating the experts in GDM. To overcome these weaknesses in the existing method, this paper presents an enhanced consensus reaching process for GDM with IFPRs, which only removes some opinions of an expert for alternative(s) instead of removing the expert from the decision group. A numerical example concerning the selection of outstanding PhD students for China Scholarship Council is given to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the enhanced consensus reaching process. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.