A Novel Linguistic Group Decision-Making Model Based on Extended Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Term Sets

Hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) is a set with ordered consecutive linguistic terms, and is very useful in addressing the situations where people are hesitant in providing their linguistic assessments. Wang [H. Wang, Extended hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets and their aggregation in group decision making, International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems8(1) (2015) 14–33.] removed the consecutive condition to introduce the notion of extended HFLTS (EHFLTS). The generalized form has wider applications in linguistic group decision-making. By introducing distance measures for EHFLTSs, in this paper we develop a novel multi-criteria group decision making model to deal with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. The model collects group linguistic information by using EHFLTSs and avoids the possible loss of information. Moreover, it can assess the importance weights of criteria according to their subjective and objective information and rank alternatives based on the rationale of TOPSIS. In order to illustrate the applicability of the proposed algorithm, two examples are given and comparisons are made with the other existing methods.