A novel distance measure considering decision makers’ psychological behaviors and its application in multiple criteria decision making

Abstract

Abstract Distance measure is a significant tool to distinguish the difference between two objects, and can be applied to many fields. The existing distance measures have an impediment as it do not take the psychological behaviors of decision-makers into consideration. In this paper, due to this drawback, several novel distance measures combining prospect theory and multi-granular linguistic term sets are proposed based on the classical Euclidean distance and Hamming distance. First, the psychological expectations of decision-makers are used as reference points, and the gains and losses are determined by using multi-granular linguistic term sets. Then the perception distance between decision-makers are calculated in conjunction with prospect value function. The principal advantage of the proposed novel distance measure can not only consider the psychological behaviors of decision-makers, but it also gets more closer to natural language. Finally, numerical examples and case study are conducted to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the novel psychological perception distance measures.