A cohesion-driven consensus reaching process for large scale group decision making under a hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets environment

Large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM) under uncertainty modelled by comparative linguistic expressions based on a hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) has recently attracted the interest of many researchers and research, due to the necessity of its function in LSGDM, and the challenges it faces such as the managing of the scalability problem, uncertainty of experts' opinions and dealing with polarized conflicting opinions. To smooth out such discrepancies and obtain agreed solutions Consensus Reaching Processes (CRPs) for LSGDM have been applied, in which experts are grouped into sub-groups according to the closeness of their opinions to deal with scalability. However, most CRPs for LSGDM are driven by a majority rule, in which larger sub-groups, where there might be internal disagreements, lead the consensus. In such processes, the internal disagreements can produce unsatisfactory solutions. Consequently, the majority view should be complemented by additional mechanisms that also measure the strength of the sub-groups' opinions. A good measurement of such strength is the cohesion among the sub-group members. Therefore, in this paper, a new cohesion measure for HFLTS based on restricted equivalence functions for measuring the experts' sub-group cohesiveness is introduced to drive the consensus process together the majority and thus reduce the impact of internal disagreements risen in majority driven CRPs. It is then integrated in a new cohesion-driven CRP approach based on LSGDM to deal with comparative linguistic expressions based on HFLTS. An experimental analysis on different large scale scenarios will show the performance and importance of cohesion in consensus based LSGDM.