Linguistic Interval Hesitant Fuzzy Sets and Their Application in Decision Making

To cope with the hesitancy and uncertainty of the decision makers' cognitions to decision-making problems, this paper introduces a new type of fuzzy sets called linguistic interval hesitant fuzzy sets. A linguistic interval hesitant fuzzy set is composed of several linguistic terms with each one having several interval membership degrees. Considering the application of linguistic interval hesitant fuzzy sets in decision making, an ordered relationship is offered, and several operational laws are defined. After that, several aggregation operators based on additive and fuzzy measures are introduced, by which the comprehensive attribute values can be obtained. Based on the defined distance measure, models for the optimal weight vectors are constructed. In addition, an approach to multi-attribute decision making with linguistic interval hesitant fuzzy information is developed. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to show the concrete application of the procedure.