A consensus process for hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations

The recently proposed hesitant fuzzy linguistic terms sets (HFLTSs) are utilized to represent the expert's subjective preferences in a linguistic preference relation and therefore a hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relation (HFLPR) is constructed. This paper aims to present a consensus process to assist the experts in achieving a predefined consensus level in the case of HFLPRs. A possibility distribution based approach is introduced to deal with HFLTSs. Consensus degrees which assess the agreement among all the experts' preferences are defined on three levels: the pairs of alternatives level, the alternatives level and the preference relation level. A feedback mechanism based on the above consensus degrees is developed and the difference with the existing approach is discussed. The proposed consensus model is illustrated by a numerical example.