An outranking approach for multi-criteria decision-making with hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets

The main purpose of this paper is to suggest an approach of multi-criteria decision-making that combines a hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) with an outranking method involving systematic comparisons of the assessment values of alternatives for each criterion. A HFLTS is more suitable than the traditional fuzzy linguistic set for describing decision-makers' preferences when they prefer to use several linguistic terms in expressions. After reviewing existing studies of HFLTSs, a novel outranking relational system of HFLTSs is developed and dominance relations for HFLTSs are introduced using outranking degrees of HFLTSs. In order to verify the efficacy of the developed method, an illustrative example is given and comparisons are made between the proposed method and other existing ones. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.