Evidential reasoning with linguistic belief structures

The Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach is an inference method to analyse multi-criteria decision-making problems with uncertainties. However, due to the pressure of time, limit of knowledge and lack of data, such problems need to be assessed using both human judgments and limited data. In this case, it is suitable to provide a belief structure by means of linguistic terms, which we refer to as linguistic belief structure. Considering that different decision-makers may have different perceptions, the semantics of human judgments can also be different. In this paper, we introduce three linguistic scale functions to capture the semantics of linguistic belief degrees for constructing a complete linguistic information fusion method. We then extend the framework of the ER approach to multi-expert multi-criteria decision making. The method proposed in this study can fill the research gap of the ER approach for multi-expert multi-criteria decision-making problems with linguistic belief structures.