a b s t r a c tLarge group decision-making (LGDM) is a special group decision-making (GDM) problem, in which a large number of persons take part in decision process, while research concerning this issue is still relatively scarce. The objective of this paper is to develop a method to solve the LGDM problem, in which a large number of persons from multiple groups take part in the decision process and express their personal evaluations on the alternatives according to the pre-established identifier set. In the method, the percentage distribution on evaluations of each group concerning each alternative is determined. The decision weight of each group concerning each alternative is obtained by aggregating the subjective weight, which is provided by the organizer, and the objective weight, determined according to the level of consensus among participators' evaluations. According to the percentage distributions and decision weights, the dominance degrees on pairwise comparisons of alternatives are calculated, and a ranking of alternatives can be determined using the PROMETHEE II method. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the use of the proposed method.
Hydromechanical and structural properties of compacted loess have a significant impact on the stability and reliability of subbase and subgrade, which needs to be quickly determined in the field and laboratory. Hence, an electrical resistivity method was used to characterize the hydromechanical and structural properties of compacted loess during constant rate of strain compression. In the present work, compacted loess samples with a dry density of 1.7 g/cm3, a diameter of 64 mm, a height of 10 mm and different water content ranging from 5–25% were prepared. The constant rate of strain (CRS) tests were conducted by a developed oedometer cell equipped with a pair of horizontal circular electrodes (diameter of 20 mm) and vertical rectangular electrodes (width of 3.5 mm) to determine the electrical resistivity of compacted loess. The results showed that as average water content increases, plastic compression indices increase from 0.220 to 0.350 and the elastic compression indices increase from 0.0152 to 0.030, but they decrease to 0.167 and 0.010 and yield stress decreases from 381.28 kPa to 72.35 kPa. Moreover, as vertical strain increases, the variation trend of average formation factor and average shape factor for the lower water content decreases but increases for the maximum water content, and the anisotropy index first decrease and then tend to increase slightly, which indicates that the structural properties of unsaturated and saturated samples during compression exhibits different trend and the anisotropy of samples tend to be stable as vertical strain increases. As the water content increases, the average formation factor and average shape factor decrease, but the anisotropy index first decreases then increases, suggesting that water content has a significant impact on these electrical indices. More important, The coefficients of average formation factor decrease from 33.830 to −1.698 and the coefficients of average shape factor decrease from 8.339 to −0.398 as water content increases, whereas there is less variation for the coefficient of anisotropic index with a value of 2.190. An equation correlating average formation factor and water content and vertical strain is regressed to characterize the hydromechanical properties of compacted loess by measuring its impedance, which can be used to evaluate the stability of compacted loessic ground and subgrade.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.