Extension of the VIKOR method for group decision making with extended hesitant fuzzy linguistic information

Group decision-making approaches are very important due to the complexity and uncertainty of many real-world decision-making problems. Some of the decision-making problems are defined in qualitative frameworks. Extended hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (EHFLTS) is proposed as a new and powerful tool for elicitation of hesitant qualitative information in group decision-making process. In this paper, we first introduced the comparison laws and a family of distance and similarity measures for extended hesitant fuzzy linguistic terms (EHFLTs) and EHFLTSs, respectively. Next, we developed the extended hesitant fuzzy linguistic (EHFL)-VIKOR method as a qualitative multi-attributes group decision-making approach based on the EHFLTS distance measures to deal with the qualitative hesitancy in group decision making. Finally, we presented an application example about selection of suitable telecommunications service provider of small- and medium-sized enterprises to verify applicability and validation of proposed method in the process of qualitative group decision making.