Distance and Aggregation-Based Methodologies for Hesitant Fuzzy Decision Making

Abstract

Hesitant fuzzy set (HFS) as an effective tool to reflect human’s hesitancy has received great attention in recent years. The importance weights of possible values in hesitant fuzzy elements (HFEs), which are the basic units of a HFS, have not been taken into account in the existing literature. Thus, the frequently used HFEs cannot deal with the situations where all the possible values are provided by experts with different levels of expertise. Consequently, in this paper, we propose an extension of typical HFS called the ordered weighted hesitant fuzzy set (OWHFS). The basic units of an OWHFS allow the membership of a given element to be defined in terms of several possible values together with their importance weights. Moreover, in order to indicate that the OWHFS has a good performance in decision making, we first present some information measures and several aggregation operators for OWHFSs. Then, we apply them to multi-attribute decision making with ordered weighted hesitant fuzzy information.