Uncertain Probabilistic Linguistic Term Sets in Group Decision Making

The probabilistic linguistic term set has been proposed to deal with the probabilistic distribution in providing linguistic assessments. However, because of various subjective and objective situations, it is usually hard for the decision makers to provide the probabilities of linguistic assessments exactly. The existing methods still have some shortcomings in dealing with ignorance. In this paper, we propose the concept of uncertain probabilistic linguistic term set (UPLTS) to serve as an extension of the existing tools. First, some basic operational laws and aggregation operators for the UPLTS are presented. Then, we develop an aggregation-based method and present the application of the UPLTSs in multiple attribute group decision making. Finally, a practical case is shown to illustrate the UPLTS.