Water-Energy-Food nexus evaluation with a social network group decision making approach based on hesitant fuzzy preference relations

Abstract With the rapid increase and development of global population and economic, the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus evaluation which is related to the sustainable development of human has become a hotspot. Whereas, the study of the WEF nexus evaluation from the perspectives of social network group decision making (SNGDM) is still a challenge. Hence, this paper aims to develop a trust-based SNGDM approach with hesitant fuzzy preference relations to the WEF nexus evaluation. In the proposed model, a new fuzzy adjacency matrix and trust score matrix based on expert’s self-confidence are defined to imply experts’ trust relationship and trust score, respectively. To improve the reliability of the final decision(s), an iterative algorithm is presented to improve the consistency of experts’ evaluations. Subsequently, the individual evaluation can be aggregated into a group one by using the trust score induced ordered weighted averaging operator while the trust scores of experts are the induced factors. Additionally, an algorithm is utilized to achieve a high level consensus in SNGDM of the WEF nexus evaluation. Finally, some comparison analyses and discussions show the feasibility and validity of the proposed method.