Three-Way Group Decision-Making With Personalized Numerical Scale of Comparative Linguistic Expression: An Application to Traditional Chinese Medicine

In most real-life decision-making situations, experts tend to utilize linguistic information rather than numerical values to express their preferences or evaluations on alternatives. Considering the complexity of the decision-making problems, it is usually difficult to use single linguistic terms to elicit experts' preferences. Linguistic expressions that are close to cognition of human-being, such as comparative linguistic expression (CLE), are suggested to be applied in such cases. Three-way decision (3WD) has been proved an effective manner to handle multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems, however there is a lack of 3WD methods dealing with linguistic expressions. By combining CLE and 3WD, a new multi-attribute three-way group decision-making (3WGDM) method incorporating CLE (called CLE-3WGDM method) is proposed. A novel personalized numerical scale (PNS) computation method, based on pre-decision in 3WGDM, is introduced to manage diverse interpretations of CLE for different individuals. Afterwards, the attribute weights are calculated through a novel optimization model, which applies the principle of deviation maximization and minimum entropy of CLE. A novel 3WD-social network method is presented to compute the weights of experts. Comparative analysis with other existing methods have been carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed one. Finally, the CLE-3WGDM method is applied to a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) decision problem.