Title: Hesitant fuzzy linguistic information aggregation in decision making

Authors: Nian Zhang

Addresses: School of Economic and Management, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, 610031, China

Abstract: As a generalisation of fuzzy linguistic set (FLS), a hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) is introduced to provide a linguistic and computational basis to increase the richness of linguistic elicitation based on the fuzzy linguistic approach and the use of context-free grammars by using comparative terms. And the HFLTS is a very useful tool to deal with fuzzy linguistic uncertainty, which can be accurately and perfectly described in terms of the opinions of experts. The aim of this paper is to develop a series of aggregation operators for hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. We first discuss the relationship between FLS and HFLTS, based on which we develop some operations for hesitant fuzzy linguistic elements. The correlations among the aggregation operators are further discussed. Based on the developed operators, we introduce a method for decision making with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. Finally, we give their application in decision making problems.

Keywords: hesitant fuzzy sets; fuzzy linguistic sets; FLS; hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set; HFLTS; context-free grammars; decision making; information aggregation; linguistic uncertainty; aggregation operators.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2014.065615

International Journal of Operational Research, 2014 Vol.21 No.4, pp.489 - 507

Received: 19 Nov 2012
Accepted: 01 Mar 2013
Published online: 25 Nov 2014 *

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