Group decision-making approach for evaluating the sustainability of constructed wetlands with probabilistic linguistic preference relations

Abstract

Industrialisation and urbanisation have led to the substantial decrease of natural wetlands. Thus, assessing the sustainability of artificial wetlands has become an important topic. Generally, people are more accustomed to using linguistic phrases to express preference information. In this case, utilising probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) is a good choice for information expression. Besides, decision makers (DMs) may prefer to construct preference matrices by comparing the pairwise alternatives. Accordingly, this study focuses on the probabilistic linguistic preference relations (PLPRs). The cosine similarity measure of PLTSs is first proposed. Thereafter, the consistency/consensus issues are discussed and a strategy based on trust degree is investigated to derive important degrees of experts. Then an optimisation model is developed to calculate the priority weights. The main novelty is the idea of maximising the similarity measure. Finally, an example of wetlands assessment is illustrated to verify the effectiveness and advantages of our approach.

Keywords:

• Probabilistic linguistic term sets
• probabilistic linguistic preference relations
• cosine similarity
• trust degree
• optimisation model

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful and constructive comments and suggestions that have led to an improved version of this paper. And, this work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71571193).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China10.13039/501100001809 (No. 71571193).