Fuzzy Group Consensus Decision Making and Its Use in Selecting Energy-Saving and Low-Carbon Technology Schemes in Star Hotels

• Main Authors: Ping Lu, Xuan Yang, Zhou-Jing Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-09-01
• Series: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
• Subjects: green tourism; energy-saving and low-carbon; group decision making; consistency index; consensus
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/9/2057

Energy-saving and low-carbon technologies play important roles in reducing environmental risk and developing green tourism. An energy-saving and low-carbon technology scheme selection may often involve multiple criteria and sub-criteria as well as multiple stakeholders or decision makers, and thus can be structured as a hierarchical multi-criteria group decision making problem. This paper proposes a framework to solve group consensus decision making problems, where decision makers’ preferences between the alternatives considered with respective to each criterion are elicited by the paired comparison method, and expressed as triangular fuzzy preference relations (TFPRs). The paper first simplifies the existing computation formulas used to determine triangular fuzzy weights of TFPRs. A consistency index is then devised to measure the inconsistency degree of a TFPR and is used to check acceptable consistency of TFPRs. By introducing a possibility degree formula of comparing any two triangular fuzzy weights, an index is defined to measure the consensus level between an individual ranking order and the group ranking order for all alternatives. A consensus model is developed in detail for solving group decision making problems with TFPRs. A case study of selecting energy-saving and low-carbon technology schemes in star hotels is provided to illustrate how to apply the proposed group decision making consensus model in practice.