Signed distance-based consensus in multi-criteria group decision-making with multi-granular hesitant unbalanced linguistic information.

•This paper deals with consensus in multi-granular hesitant unbalanced linguistic MCGDM.•It proposes a signed distance-based transformation function.•It can deal with multi-granular hesitant unbalanced linguistic information.•It proposes a family of signed distance-based consensus measures.•It demonstrates the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.