Abstract:
Purpose/Significance Consensus in group decision making, committed to finding solutions that every decision maker actively supports by managing the conflict of opinion, is a much-discussed research question in group decision making (GDM). To promote the development of the consensus in group decision making, it is necessary to provide a comprehensive review on the development of the consensus in group decision making and discussion on its future research direction. Design/Methodology In the first place, this paper presents the general framework of the consensus in group decision making and analyzes its research paradigm in different environments. Secondly, this paper analyzes some typical applications of consensus in group decision making. Finally, some current research reviews and perspectives are discussed. Findings/Conclusions This paper finds that there are two main consensus rules, namely identification rule and direction rule, optimization-based rule, and several consensus decision making models under traditional and complex decision-making environments are proposed based on the above two consensus rules. These models applied in failure model effectiveness analysis, supply chain management, water resource management, and emergency/disaster management have demonstrated a good result. Moreover, the in-depth study of decision makers’ behaviors and the optimal design of consensus in group decision making that incorporates artificial intelligence such as preferential learning is a very promising research direction.