Title: A farmland choice based on hesitant fuzzy linguistic preferences relations

Authors: Nesrin Halouani; Sonia Hajlaoui

Addresses: Department of Quantitative Methods of Higher Institute of Business Administration, ISAAS, University of Sfax, Tunisia ' Department of Quantitative Methods of University of Economic Sciences and Management, FSEG, University of Sfax, Tunisia

Abstract: A new type of fuzzy preference structure, called hesitant linguistic preference relations, is developed in order to describe uncertain evaluation information in group decision-making (GDM) farmland choice. Moreover, it allows decision makers to offer all possible linguistic terms that are not accounted for in current preference structure types when we compare two alternatives. Systematic aggregation operators are proposed to aggregate hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. In addition, an approach to GDM based on PROMETHEE method concepts and hesitant linguistic preference relations is developed to take into account the differences in opinions between individual decision makers. An agriculture real case study is implemented to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed method. Also, a sensitivity analysis is carried out to reveal the effect of the criteria weighting variations on the originally obtained ranking.

Keywords: MCDA; preference relations; fuzzy sets; linguistic terms; hesitant fuzzy sets; HFS; hesitant linguistic terms; PROMETHEE method; farmland choice.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2018.092890

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2018 Vol.8 No.3, pp.291 - 317

Received: 12 Feb 2016
Accepted: 02 Sep 2016
Published online: 02 Jul 2018 *

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