TOPSIS-based approach for hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets with possibility distribution information

Abstract

Making decisions are in need of methodological and/or computational support under various environments. The hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs) are widely used to manage such an environment where the experts are hesitant between several possible linguistic values. The concept of possibility distribution for an HFLTS has been developed which provides a way to express the additional information within the HFLTS. The aim of this paper is to present a new TOPSIS method to solve multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems with hesitant information. The hesitant fuzzy linguistic weighted average (HFLWA) operator is given to aggregate individual preferences into group preferences. Due to the fact that both comparisons and distance measures over preference format play critical roles in the TOPSIS method, new definitions for comparison method and distance measure between two HFLTSs are presented. Further, a procedure of the new TOPSIS for HFLTSs is proposed in detail and a framework for MAGDM based on the TOPSIS method is presented. Finally, an example for supplier selection is shown to highlight how the proposed approach works in practice.