Informatica

Determining criteria importance is a crucial task in multi-criteria decision-making problems, and the Best-Worst Method (BWM) has emerged as an effective weighting technique due to its reduced number of pairwise comparisons. Although BWM has been extended to handle group decision-making and linguistic information, existing approaches do not adequately address disagreements among evaluators, which may lead to dissatisfaction with the resulting criteria weights. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a consensus-based BWM for linguistic multi-criteria group decision-making. The proposed approach obtains consensual collective weights by minimally modifying the evaluators’ initial linguistic preferences. The resulting solution can support moderators and evaluators during consensus-reaching processes by facilitating the identification of disagreements and the generation of appropriate recommendations. The proposal is developed within the 2-tuple linguistic framework and provides both numerical and linguistic representations of the resulting weights. In addition, a novel stochastic consistency index is introduced to assess the reliability of evaluators’ preferences. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposal are illustrated through a real-world case study and analysed by means of comparative and sensitivity analyses.

Decision-making under strict uncertainty involves evaluating a set of alternatives without knowledge of the probability of scenarios using crisp evaluations. Our work reformulates traditional decision rules to a fuzzy environment, retaining the interpretability of classical principles while incorporating imprecision. Our methodological proposal provides a unified, flexible, and mathematically consistent framework for decision-making under imprecise payoffs. We adapt a total ordering mechanism for trapezoidal fuzzy numbers and admissible interval orders. Our application case study to portfolio selection under fuzzy strict uncertainty demonstrates how the proposed fuzzy generalization can handle financial imprecision and investor risk attitudes through ranking functions.

Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators have been widely applied in Group Decision-Making (GDM) to fuse expert opinions. However, their effectiveness depends on the selection of an appropriate weighting vector, which remains a challenge due to limited research on its impact on Consensus Reaching Processes (CRPs). This paper addresses this gap by analysing the influence of different OWA weighting techniques on consensus formation, particularly in large-scale GDM (LSGDM) scenarios. To do so, we propose a Comprehensive Minimum Cost Consensus (CMCC) model that integrates OWA operators with classical consensus measures to enhance the decision-making process. Since existing OWA-based Minimum Cost Consensus (MCC) models struggle with computational complexity, we introduce linearized versions of the OWA-based CMCC model tailored for LSGDM applications. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed comparison of various OWA weight allocation methods, assessing their impact on consensus quality under different levels of expert participation and opinion polarization. Additionally, our linearized formulations significantly reduce the computational cost for OWA-based CMCC models, improving their scalability.