Conflict elimination based on opinion dynamics in fuzzy group decision-making

The different preferences of experts in fuzzy group decision-making problems will lead to conflict, which hinders the reaching of consensus. In present conflict management techniques, local conflict among individual experts or the overall level of conflict is often concerned. This paper deals with conflict relations by opinion dynamics to resolve the whole and local conflicts among experts. This paper proposes a conflict resolution method based on opinion dynamics, which mainly includes three parts: (1) trust propagation: taking the consistency index into account in the propagation of trust, aiming at making as objective an assessment as possible of the competence and social status of experts; (2) conflict detection and elimination: reducing conflicts to an acceptable level through multiple rounds of preference adjustment according to the harmony degree; (3) alternatives selection: proposing a scoring function combining extent superiority with number superiority to score and rank the alternatives. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method.