A novel linguistic decision-making method based on the voting model for large-scale linguistic decision making

The notable characteristic of large-scale linguistic decision-making problems is that there are so many decision makers who provide linguistic assessments by using fuzzy linguistic representation models. In real-world applications, fuzzy linguistic terms mean different things for different people, and linguistic assessments based on different linguistic representation models may be simultaneous in the same large-scale linguistic decision-making problems. To this end, a novel linguistic decision-making method based on the voting model is proposed in the paper to deal with multi-linguistic assessments provided by decision makers. In large-scale linguistic decision process, evaluation-based voting is defined and multi-linguistic decision matrix is designed to represent multi-linguistic assessments provided by decision makers by using different linguistic representation models, and properties of the decision matrix are analyzed to show that linguistic assessments based on different linguistic representation models can be simultaneously represented. Based on multi-linguistic decision matrix, a new linguistic decision-making framework is developed to deal with large-scale linguistic decision-making problems with multi-linguistic assessments, in which normalization of multi-linguistic decision matrix and trust degrees of linguistic terms are contained, and more important, based on trust degrees of linguistic terms and 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic aggregation operators, an uniform fusion method of multi-linguistic assessments is proposed to aggregate multi-linguistic assessments of large-scale linguistic decision-making problems. Finally, user experiences of shared bikes, which are a large-scale linguistic decision-making problem in real-world applications, are employed to show the new decision-making framework and the uniform fusion method of multi-linguistic assessments, and furthermore, compared with existing linguistic decision-making methods analyzed in the example, it seems that multi-linguistic decision matrix and the uniform fusion method are useful and effective tools to deal with large-scale linguistic decision-making problems with multi-linguistic assessments.