The ELECTRE I Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Method Based on Hesitant Fuzzy Sets

Hesitant fuzzy set (HFS), which allows the membership degree of an element to a set represented by several possible values, is considered as a powerful tool to express uncertain information in the process of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems. In this paper, we develop a hesitant fuzzy ELECTRE I (HF-ELECTRE I) method and apply it to solve the MCDM problem under hesitant fuzzy environments. The new method is formulated using the concepts of hesitant fuzzy concordance and hesitant fuzzy discordance which are based on the given score function and deviation function, and employed to determine the preferable alternative. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the application of the proposed method, and the influence of different numbers of alternatives on outranking relations is analyzed based on a derived sensitive parameter interval in which a change in the parameters has no effects on the set of the nonoutranked alternatives. The randomly generated numerical cases are also investigated in the framework of the HF-ELECTRE I method. Furthermore, the outranking relations obtained in the HF-ELECTRE I method with those derived from the aggregation operator-based approach and the ELECTRE III and ELECTRE IV methods are discussed.