Hesitant Fuzzy Maclaurin Symmetric Mean Operators and Its Application to Multiple-Attribute Decision Making

In this paper, we investigate the multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems based on traditional Maclaurin symmetric mean operator operating under hesitant fuzzy environment. The Maclaurin symmetric mean (MSM) operator is a classical mean type aggregation operator and has strong modeling capability in modern information fusion theory, which has particular advantages for aggregating multi-dimension arguments. The prominent characteristic of the MSM operator is that it can capture the interrelationship among the multi-input arguments. Motivated by the idea of MSM operator, we develop the hesitant fuzzy Maclaurin symmetric mean (HFMSM) operator for aggregating the hesitant fuzzy information. Some desirable properties such as monotonicity, boundedness, idempotency are studied. Furthermore, we have discussed some special cases with respect to different parameter values of the HFMSM operator in detail. For the situations where the input arguments have different importance, we further develop the weighted hesitant fuzzy Maclaurin symmetric mean operator to aggregate hesitant fuzzy information. Based on which, an approach to MADM problems with hesitant fuzzy information is developed. Finally, a practical example with paper quality evaluation of sciencepaper online in China is provided to illustrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method.