Consensual Processes

by Herrera-viedma, Enrique; Garcia-Lapresta, Jose Luis; Kacprzyk, Janusz; Fedrizzi, Mario; Nurmi, Hannu

• ISBN13: 9783642205323
• ISBN10: 3642205321
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-31
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York Inc

Summary

Consensus has been a much talked about word for centuries, maybe millennia since people have always been aware of its importance for arriving at proper decisions which have had a long lasting impact on life of groups of people, countries or even civilizations. Needless to say that the growing complexity of the present world, in all its social, economic and technological dimensions, has made the word to be used so frequently nowadays.What concerns the way consensus is usually meant, by consensus it is meant, on the one hand, a general agreement within the group of people, or agents, both human and software. Clearly, in the strict meaning the general agreement has been viewed in the sense of a full and unanimous agreement. Since this may be an unreachable ideal, people have replaced this ideal concept by a more realistic one that encompasses all forms of partial, graded, etc. agreements within a group. This is also assumed on general in this volume. The second sense of consensus is related to a process of reaching consensus which aims at reaching an agreement, possibly a high one, of all, or most, agents. It can involve the resolution and/or mitigation of some minor objections concerning options or aspects in question or individual agents involved. This second sense of consensus does involve the first one because the process of reaching an agreement must be related to some assessment of agreement within the group.This volume is concerned with consensus reaching processes which may occur both within human groups and groups of intelligent agents. It is adopted, first of all, a modern and realistic definition of consensus that considers consensus not necessarily as full and unanimous agreement but as agreement to some extent. This calls for some soft computational tools and techniques,notably fuzzy and possibilistic ones to be able to account for imprecision in the very meaning of many concepts, issues and properties that play a role in both that more realistic definition of consensus and the very process of consensus reaching. In this setting a comprehensive coverage of various issues related to consensus and consensual processes is provided.