Some properties of linguistic preference relation and its ranking in group decision making

The group decision making problem with linguistic preference relations is studied. The concept of additive consistent linguistic preference relation is defined, and then some properties of the additive consistent linguistic preference relation are studied. In order to rank the alternatives in the group decision making with the linguistic preference relations, the weighted average is first utilized to combine the group linguistic preference relations to one linguistic preference relation, and then the transformation function is proposed to transform the linguistic preference relation to the multiplicative preference relation, and thus the Saaty's eigenvector method (EM) of multiplicative preference relation is utilized to rank the alternatives in group decision making with the linguistic preference relations. Finally, an illustrative numerical example is given to verify the proposed method. A comparative study to the linguistic ordered weighted averaging (LOWA) operator method is also demonstrated.