Social Influence in Fuzzy Group Decision Making with Applications

Group decision making (GDM) is a process of evaluating multi-expert preferences towards criteria or alternatives in order to solve problems in daily life. The previous GDM models often neglected the discussion on experts’ relationships and interactions between them. The incorporation of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in decision making context provides measurement of experts’ relations and interactions in the group. The experts normally have different background, status, position, level of knowledge, expertise, experience etc., in which the group decision might be changed or influenced. The influence notion in Social Influence Network (SIN) plays an important role in defining the influence element in decision making perspective. This new area of study is known as Social Influence Group Decision Making (SIGDM). This paper proposed the framework of the similarity-influence network based fuzzy group decision making model. The influence measure is utilized to identify the most influential expert in the network. For the purpose of aggregating all individual expert preferences into a collective one, the influence-based aggregation operator is used. This paper discusses on the possible applications and future works related to the SIGDM.