A Systems-Based Superior–Committee Group Decision-Support Method Under Linguistic Intuitionistic Fuzzy Uncertainty

Abstract

Decision-making in organizational and socio-technical systems often involves a responsible superior expert who must integrate committee judgments expressed under linguistic uncertainty, hesitation, and heterogeneous expertise. This paper proposes a systems-based superior–committee group decision-support method for criteria weighting under linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy uncertainty. First, the best–worst method is extended by using linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy numbers to represent pairwise preference information with linguistic membership, non-membership, and indeterminacy degrees. A utility transformation is then introduced to convert linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy comparisons into numerical preference values, enabling criteria weights to be derived through linear programming models. Second, a two-stage group decision-support framework is developed for superior–committee decision structures. In the first stage, committee expert influence is calculated by integrating prior expert weights obtained from the superior expert’s evaluation with judgment-derived expert weights based on certainty and agreement. In the second stage, the final criteria weights are obtained by combining the superior expert’s judgments with the weighted committee judgments. A constructed UAV criteria-weighting case and complementary numerical analyses are presented to illustrate the calculation process and examine the behavior of the proposed method. The results show that the framework provides a transparent mechanism for representing uncertain preferences, assigning expert influence, and deriving interpretable criteria weights in superior–committee group decision systems.