Feasible strategies for conflict resolution within intuitionistic fuzzy preference-based conflict situations
Guangming Lang, Mingchuan Shang, Mengjun Hu, Jie Zhou, Feng Xu
TL;DR
The paper addresses the inadequacy of binary preference relations in three-way conflict analysis by introducing an intuitionistic fuzzy preference-based framework. It defines intuitionistic fuzzy preferences with dual measures (\mu,\nu) and hesitation (\pi), formulates a distance-based conflict function CF_{ij} and its bundle extension CF_J, and develops tri-section mechanisms for agent pairs, the agent set, and the issue set. A Bayesian minimum-risk approach derives objective thresholds for tri-sections, and an adjustment-mechanism-based optimization constructs feasible strategies that jointly minimize conflict and modification magnitude, demonstrated via a Middle East example. The results yield a more expressive analysis of attitudes under uncertainty and provide actionable strategies for resolving conflicts through structured adjustments, with potential extensions to hybrid settings, weighted agents/issues, and more efficient algorithms.
Abstract
In three-way conflict analysis, preference-based conflict situations characterize agents' attitudes towards issues by formally modeling their preferences over pairs of issues. However, existing preference-based conflict models rely exclusively on three qualitative relations, namely, preference, converse, and indifference, to describe agents' attitudes towards issue pairs, which significantly limits their capacity in capturing the essence of conflict. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the concept of an intuitionistic fuzzy preference-based conflict situation that captures agents' attitudes towards issue pairs with finer granularity than that afforded by classical preference-based models. Afterwards, we develop intuitionistic fuzzy preference-based conflict measures within this framework, and construct three-way conflict analysis models for trisecting the set of agent pairs, the agent set, and the issue set. Additionally, relative loss functions built on the proposed conflict functions are employed to calculate thresholds for three-way conflict analysis. Finally, we present adjustment mechanism-based feasible strategies that simultaneously account for both adjustment magnitudes and conflict degrees, together with an algorithm for constructing such feasible strategies, and provide an illustrative example to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed model.