Minimum-Cost Consensus Models Under Aggregation Operators

In group decision making, consensus models are decision aid tools and help experts modify their individual opinions to reach a closer agreement. Based on the concept of minimum-cost consensus, this paper proposes a novel framework to achieve minimum-cost consensus under aggregation operators. Analytical results indicate that the proposed framework reduces to the consensus model of Ben-Arieh <etal xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> when the selected aggregation operator is the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator with weight vector <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">(1/2, …, 0, …, 1/2)T</tex> </formula> . Furthermore, this paper closely examines the minimum-cost consensus models with a linear cost function under the common aggregation operators (e.g., the weighted averaging operator and the OWA operator). Linear-programming-based approaches are also developed to solve these models. The results of this paper significantly contribute to efforts to develop the consensus model of Ben-Arieh <etal xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>