Integrating an Extended Outranking-TOPSIS Method with Probabilistic Linguistic Term Sets for Multiattribute Group Decision-Making

Abstract

Group decision-making is a common activity in organizational management and economic conditions. In practice, the opinions of experts may be fuzzy. This paper proposes integrating an extended outranking-TOPSIS method with probabilistic linguistic term sets for multiattribute group decision-making, which is used to solve the real-world public-private partnership (PPP) project selection problem. First, an extended outranking method based on probabilistic linguistic term sets is proposed, and each expert’s ranking of alternatives is obtained according to this method. After the individual ranking is completed, the large-scale expert group is clustered by the K-means clustering method, and then the improved consensus mechanism is used to study the degree of consensus of the expert group. If the consensus of the group is not up to the standard, then, for clusters with a lower degree of consensus with the group, the feedback mechanism is used to adjust the weight between different clusters so that the group consensus can be improved. After achieving the target group consensus, an improved technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is used to synthesize expert opinions, and the ranking results are obtained. Finally, there are cases used to demonstrate the feasibility and rationality of the method.