Group decision making techniques for risk assessment: a literature review and research directions

Risk assessment is part of a decision making process that help organizations to achieve intended objectives. For this purpose, the literature presents several studies that propose computing with words (CW) combined with decision making techniques. It is common sense that in the organizational context, risk assessment should be reached by a group of experts. However, it was not found attempts of a literature review for group decision making techniques that support risk assessment. Therefore, this paper presents a review of 87 studies since 1996 that propose group decision making techniques to risk assessment. It presents a bibliometric analysis considering their year of publication, country, journal and subject. Also, the reviewed studies were classified according to the inputs (crisp or soft), linguistic representations and group decision methods. The results showed a predominance of Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods and an increase of fuzzy sets generalization proposals. In addition, it was found that the majority of the studies apply aggregation methods considering the individual experts judgments instead of consensus. Finally, this paper suggests some research directions for further studies.