Heterogeneous group consensus method with three-way decisions based on fuzzy social networks and manipulation behaviors under multi-scale information systems

A multi-scale information system (MSIS) is a kind of information system that divides the data into different scales according to the thickness of different granularities, which solves the limitation of traditional single-scale information systems. In view of the importance on different data types of intervalvalues (IVs), intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IFNs), hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs), and fuzzy preference relations (FPRs) in copying with uncertain decision making issues and the challenges of current research on heterogeneous decision making issues under MSISs, this paper studies such heterogeneous decision making issues based on a fuzzy sociometric matrix (FSM) in MSISs. The manipulative behavior is a method of assigning behavioral weights for sequential attitude modeling in order to achieve a goal. In view of this, this paper develops a heterogeneous group consensus (HGC) method under MSISs based on fuzzy social networks (FSNs) and manipulative behaviors (MBs), i.e., the MSIS-MB-HGC method. The method aims to propose a consensus reaching process (CRP) to deal with heterogeneous group decision making (GDM) problems. First, a method to obtain an MSIS with different data types is constructed. Then, various data types are converted to fuzzy connection numbers in a uniform way. Subsequently, a fuzzy sociometric matrix is constructed being used to represent the trust relations between decision makers. Further, the three-way decision (TWD) is considered for the consensus feedback process. Finally, the utility and superiority of the constructed MSIS-MBHGC method in consensus reaching process (CRP) are further confirmed through comparative analysis with the existing related works by a real case.