Hesitant fuzzy power aggregation operators and their application to multiple attribute group decision making

The hesitant fuzzy set is a useful generalization of the fuzzy set that is designed for situations in which it is difficult to determine the membership of an element to a set owing to ambiguity between a few different values. In this paper, we develop a wide range of hesitant fuzzy power aggregation operators for hesitant fuzzy information. We first introduce several power aggregation operators and then extend these operators to hesitant fuzzy environments, i.e., we introduce operators to aggregate input arguments that take the form of hesitant fuzzy sets. We demonstrate several useful properties of the operators and discuss the relationships between them. The new aggregation operators are utilized to develop techniques for multiple attribute group decision making with hesitant fuzzy information. Finally, some practical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.