Multi-criteria decision analysis based on hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets: Application in photovoltaic technologies assessment

Abstract

Last decade has shown an important growth of the application of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) in many domains, especially in renewable energy assessment concerns. The introduction of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs) was motivated by the limitations of classical linguistic fuzzy models. Nevertheless, the building of multi-criteria based HFLTSs approaches remains a theoretical question still not studied in detail. In this paper, we are interested in a recent proposal of combining outranking approaches with HFLTSs in an MCDM context. To support decision makers (DMs) under uncertainty, fuzzy preference relations and profiles for alternatives are proposed using uncertainty degrees for HFLTSs. Armed with the pre-defined multi-criteria relations and profiles, we will be able to provide DMs with a clear vision about the candidates' alternatives which are also meaningful from a multi-criteria fuzzy perspective. In order to verify the appropriateness and the efficacy of the developed method, an illustrative example is given considering the assessment of different solar photovoltaic technologies.