A Linguistic Information Granulation Model and Its Penalty Function-Based Co-Evolutionary PSO Solution Approach for Supporting GDM with Distributed Linguistic Preference Relations

•Propose a linguistic information granulation model.•Develop a penalty function-based co-evolutionary PSO (PFCPSO) solution approach.•Present the whole algorithm framework for the PFCPSO solution approach.•Discuss how the granulation model and the PFCPSO solution approach work in practice.•Compare PFCPSO and co-evolutionary PSO in terms of the performance of the solution.