A hesitant fuzzy SMART method based on a new score function for information literacy assessment of teachers

As two powerful and flexible tools for decision-makers (DMs) to model the complex cognition, the hesitant fuzzy set (HFS) and hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) allow DMs to express their opinions with several possible membership values or linguistic terms on the objects over each criterion. The aim of this article is to develop a novel score function of the HFS and HFLTS including hesitant degree and fuzzy degree information. For this purpose, the notion of fuzzy degree of the hesitant fuzzy element (HFE) and hesitant fuzzy linguistic element (HFLE) is introduced first. Then, considering both the hesitant degree and fuzzy degree information in expressions, the new score function, namely the Score-H&FD, is designed. Based on which, we extend the classical SMART (simple multi-attribute rating technique) method to the hesitant fuzzy environment. As a result, the hesitant fuzzy SMART (HF-SMART) method is developed in this article. Afterwards, we apply our proposed approach to assess and rank several teachers concerning information literacy. Finally, sensitive analysis and comparative analysis are carried out. The results show that the proposed method in this article has substantial advantages and applicability.