Abstract
This paper explores how to handle multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems in which the criteria values of alternatives take the form of comparative linguistic expressions. Firstly, the new concept of hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (HTrFNs) is provided to model the semantics of the comparative linguistic expressions. Then, the operational laws and the distance measures of HTrFNs are presented. Afterwards, a useful outranking method, the hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy QUALIFLEX method, is developed to handle the MCDM problems with hierarchical structure in the environment of HTrFN. At length, the proposed method is applied to evaluating green supply chain initiatives in order to achieve sustainable economic and environmental performance, and a case study concerned with a fashion retail chain is presented to demonstrate its feasibility and applicability, also, a comparative analysis with other relevant approaches is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Highlights
With the increase of public awareness of the need to protect the environment, it is urgent for businesses to introduce and promote business practices that help ease the negative impacts of their actions on the environment [1]
Based on the concepts and operational laws of trapezoidal fuzzy number (TrFN) and hesitant fuzzy elements (HFEs), we present a new concept of the hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy set, which is good enough to represent the vagueness of the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS)
Inspired by the operations on HFEs and TrFNs, we present the basic operations of hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (HTrFNs)
Summary
With the increase of public awareness of the need to protect the environment, it is urgent for businesses to introduce and promote business practices that help ease the negative impacts of their actions on the environment [1]. The QUALIFLEX method has recently been extended into various fuzzy decision environments, such as the decision environment of interval Type-2 TrFNs [17,18], the context of hesitant fuzzy sets [19], the context of intuitionistic fuzzy sets [20], the environment of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets [21,22], etc These previous QUALIFLEX methods fail to deal with the hierarchical MCDM problems with CLEs based on HTrFNs. in this paper, we will leverage the QUALIFLEX approach to develop a hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy QUALIFLEX method. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the concepts of TrFNs, HFEs and HFLTSs and introduces the new concept of HTrFNs. Section 3 develops a hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy QUALIFLEX approach to solve the hierarchical MCDM problems with HTrFNs. In Section 4, a case study is presented, and a comparative analysis with other relevant approaches is conducted.
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