Cloud model based approach to group decision making with uncertain pure linguistic information

The cloud model, which mainly reflects the uncertainty in the real life and the concepts in human knowledge: fuzziness and randomness. Actually, many practical problems occur in uncertain environments, especially in the situations where the information about all the criteria weights, criteria values and expert weights are uncertain linguistic variables called uncertain pure linguistic problems. For this purpose, In this paper, we present an approach to multi-criteria group decision-making with uncertain pure linguistic information based on the cloud model. To do so, firstly, the uncertain linguistic values are converted into integrated cloud and interval integrated cloud, respectively, and the cloud decision-making information are converted into generating floating cloud and generating floating interval cloud by the cloud operational laws. Secondly, by means of the Hamming distance and closeness degree, the ranking of all alternatives is determined. Finally, a numerical example and comparative analysis with related decision-making methods are provided to illustrate the practicality and feasibility of the proposed method.