Abstract
Consensus Reaching Process (CRP) is a necessary process to achieve agreed solutions in group decision making (GDM) problems. Usually, these problems are defined in uncertain contexts, in which experts do not have a full and precise knowledge about all aspects of the problem. In real-world GDM problems under uncertainty, it is usual that experts express their preferences by using linguistic expressions. Consequently, different methodologies have modelled linguistic information, in which computing with words stands out and whose basis is the fuzzy linguistic approach and their extensions. Even though, multiple consensus approaches under fuzzy linguistic environments have been proposed in the specialized literature, there are still some areas where their performance must be improved because of several persistent drawbacks. The drawbacks include the use of single linguistic terms that are not always enough to model the uncertainty in experts' knowledge or the oversimplification of fuzzy information during the computational processes by defuzzification processes into crisp values, which usually implies a loss of information and precision in the results and also a lack of interpretability. Therefore, to improving the effects of previous drawbacks, this paper aims at presenting a novel CRP for GDM problems dealing with Extended Comparative Linguistic Expressions with Symbolic Translation (ELICIT) for modelling experts' linguistic preferences. Such a CRP will overcome previous limitations because ELICIT information allows both fuzzy modelling of the experts' uncertainty including hesitancy and performs comprehensive fuzzy computations to, ultimately, obtain precise and understandable linguistic results. Additionally, the proposed CRP model is implemented and integrated into the CRP support system so-called A FRamework for the analYsis of Consensus Approaches (AFRYCA) 3.0 that facilitates the application of the proposed CRP and its comparison with previous models.