A Framework of Directed Network Based Influence-Trust Fuzzy Group Decision Making

Daily life requires individuals or groups of decision-makers to engage in critical decision-making processes. Fuzzy set theory has been integrated into group decision-making (GDM) to address the ambiguity and vagueness of expert preferences. Social Network Group Decision Making (SNGDM) is a newly emerging research area that focuses on the use of social networks to facilitate information exchange and communication among experts in GDM. Moreover, Social Influence Group Decision Making (SIGDM) has been initiated, which considers social influence as a factor that can impact experts’ preferences during interactions or discussions. Studies in this area have proposed innovative measurements of social influence, including the use of trust statements to explicitly influence experts’ opinions. In this study, a new trust index called TrustRank is proposed, which acts as an additional weightage of experts’ importance and is embedded in the influence network measure that represents the strength of the expert’s influence degree. These values are then utilized as the order-inducing variable in the IOWA-based fusion operator to obtain the collective preference and ranking of alternatives. The proposed framework, which is the directed network-based Influence-Trust Fuzzy GDM, is presented along with its implementation, results, and discussion to showcase its applicability.