LAUSR

This article presents a multiattribute group decision-making (MAGDM) method using cloud models to handle decision problems with gray uncertain linguistic variables that contain both subjective and objective uncertainty. In this new method, the new concepts of gray uncertain linguistic variable and gray comprehensive cloud are defined, and a method for converting gray uncertain linguistic variables into gray comprehensive clouds is provided. A gray comprehensive clouds-weighted averaging (GCC-WA) operator is proposed to aggregate the information with multiple gray comprehensive clouds. A distance measure between two gray comprehensive clouds is defined to form the gray comprehensive cloud-hybrid closeness degree (GCC-HCD), which is then applied to rank the alternatives. An example of an offshore mining investment is applied to validate the method. Sensitivity analysis and comparison analysis are carried out with other congeneric methods.