Semantic dominance analysis for multicriteria decision-making problems with unbalanced linguistic scale

The multicriteria decision‐making problem with an unbalanced linguistic scale is analyzed by multicriteria semantic dominance (MCSD) technique. The technique only requires the available partial semantics information about the scale. The MCSD rules on two types of unbalanced linguistic scale are introduced and proven. With these rules, alternatives are divided into two mutually exclusive sets called the efficient set and inefficient set. The decision maker with a specific type of linguistic scale will never choose the alternative from the corresponding inefficient set as the feasible one. Thus he/she can easily choose from the original alternative set. An example is also provided to illustrate the procedure of the proposed method.