A fuzzy envelope for hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set and its application to multicriteria decision making

Decision making is a process common to human beings. The uncertainty and fuzziness of problems demand the use of the fuzzy linguistic approach to model qualitative aspects of problems related to decision. The recent proposal of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets supports the elicitation of comparative linguistic expressions in hesitant situations when experts hesitate among different linguistic terms to provide their assessments. The use of linguistic intervals whose results lose their initial fuzzy representation was introduced to facilitate the computing processes in which such expressions are used. The aim of this paper is to present a new representation of the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets by means of a fuzzy envelope to carry out the computing with words processes. This new fuzzy envelope can be directly applied to fuzzy multicriteria decision making models. An illustrative example of its application to a supplier selection problem through the use of fuzzy TOPSIS is presented. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.