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

The group decision making problem with linguistic pref- erence 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 eigenvec- tor 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.

Approaches to Improving Consistency of Interval Fuzzy Preference Relations

This article introduces a consistency index for measuring the consistency level of an interval fuzzy preference relation（IFPR）.An approach is then proposed to construct an additive consistent IFPR from a given inconsistent IFPR.By using a weighted averaging method combining the original IFPR and the constructed consistent IFPR,a formula is put forward to repair an inconsistent IFPR to generate an IFPR with acceptable consistency.An iterative algorithm is subsequently developed to rectify an inconsistent IFPR and derive one with acceptable consistency and weak transitivity.The proposed approaches can not only improve consistency of IFPRs but also preserve the initial interval uncertainty information as much as possible.Numerical examples are presented to illustrate how to apply the proposed approaches.