Consensus reaching with trust evolution in social network group decision making

Abstract The trust degrees among individuals play an important role in social network group decision making (SNGDM). They are assumed to be unchanged with the time in most of extant SNGDM studies. However, in some SNGDM scenarios, the trust degrees of individuals will evolve with the time due to the changes of the opinion similarities among individuals. In this paper, we discuss the consensus reaching issue in SNGDM with trust evolution. Specifically, we first formulate a consensus reaching problem with trust evolution, and then propose its resolution framework. In this framework, we establish the trust evolution model, in which the trust degrees among individuals at the next time are determined by the individuals’ historical trust degrees and the opinion similarities at this time. Based on this, we design a novel consensus reaching process, called CRP-OD-TE, which first includes the opinion dynamics-based endogenous feedback mechanism, and the trust evolution-based exogenous feedback mechanism. Furthermore, two applications are provided to illustrate the proposed CRP-OD-TE. Finally, we complete some simulations and comparative analysis. The results show that (1) the introduction of opinion dynamics into CRP as the endogenous feedback mechanism can accelerate the process of consensus reaching; and (2) the evolution of trust degrees has a significant impact on the group consensus reaching, which may be beneficial or destructive.