Search Results (3)

Multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) is widely applied to various areas for solving real-life problems, including technology selection, credit assessment, strategic planning evaluation, supplier selection, etc. To describe the complex and imprecise cognition, it is more convenient to provide the decision-making information in linguistic terms rather than concrete numerical values. Thus, several linguistic models, such as the fuzzy linguistic approach (FLA), hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs), hesitant intuitionistic fuzzy linguistic term sets (HIFLTSs), and probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTS) have been proposed successively. Due to the flexibility and comprehensiveness of PLTS, it has aroused growing concern. However, it also has a big limitation of requiring the membership degree to be 1 by default, and it does not consider the degree of non-membership and hesitancy of a linguistic variable. Therefore, the probabilistic hesitant intuitionistic fuzzy linguistic term sets (PHIFLTSs) have been presented to extend the PLTS by combining the membership and non-membership in symmetry to depict the evaluation of the experts. To overcome the existing shortcomings and enrich the methodology framework of PHIFLTSs, some novel operational laws are defined to extend the applicability and methodology of the PHIFLTSs in MAGDM. Furthermore, the distance and correlation measures for the PHIFLTSs are improved to make up the shortage of the current distance measures. In addition, the unbalanced linguistic terms are taken into account to represent the cognitive complex information of experts. At last, a MAGDM model based on the multiplicative multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis (MULTIMOORA) approach with the use of the developed novel operational laws and correlation measures is presented, which results in more accuracy and effectiveness. A real-word application example is presented to demonstrate the working of the proposed methodology. Moreover, a thorough comparison is done with related existing works in order to show the validity of this methodology. Full article

As an effective tool to express the subjective preferences of decision makers, the linguistic term sets (LTS) have been widely used in group decision-making (GDM) problems, such as hesitant fuzzy LTS, linguistic hesitant fuzzy sets, probabilistic LTS, etc. However, due to the increasing complexity of practical decision-making (DM) problems, LTS still has a lot of room to expand in fuzzy theory. Qualitative uncertainty information in the application of GDM is yet to be improved. Therefore, in order to improve the applicability of linguistic terms in DM problems, a probabilistic uncertain linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy set (PULIFS) that can fully express the decision-maker’s (DM’s) evaluation information is first proposed. To improve the rationality of DM results, we give a method for determining individual weights in the probabilistic uncertain linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy preference relation (PULIFPR) environment. In addition, we present two consistency definitions of PULIFPR to reflect both the assessment information and risk attitudes of decision makers. Subsequently, a series of goal programming models (GPMs) are established, which effectively avoid the consistency check and correction process of existing methods. Finally, the developed method is applied to an empirical example concerning the selection of a virtual reality (VR) project. The advantages of the proposed method are demonstrated by comparative analysis. Full article

Decision making is the key component of people’s daily life, from choosing a mobile phone to engaging in a war. To model the real world more accurately, probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) were proposed to manage a situation in which several possible linguistic terms along their corresponding probabilities are considered at the same time. Previously, in linguistic term sets, the probabilities of all linguistic term sets are considered to be equal which is unrealistic. In the process of decision making, due to the vagueness and complexity of real life, an expert usually hesitates and unable to express its opinion in a single term, thus making it difficult to reach a final agreement. To handle real life scenarios of a more complex nature, only membership linguistic decision making is unfruitful; thus, some mechanism is needed to express non-membership linguistic term set to deal with imprecise and uncertain information in more efficient manner. In this article, a novel notion called probabilistic hesitant intuitionistic linguistic term set (PHILTS) is designed, which is composed of membership PLTSs and non-membership PLTSs describing the opinions of decision makers (DMs). In the theme of PHILTS, the probabilities of membership linguistic terms and non-membership linguistic terms are considered to be independent. Then, basic operations, some governing operational laws, the aggregation operators, normalization process and comparison method are studied for PHILTSs. Thereafter, two practical decision making models: aggregation based model and the extended TOPSIS model for PHILTS are designed to classify the alternatives from the best to worst, as an application of PHILTS to multi-attribute group decision making. In the end, a practical problem of real life about the selection of the best alternative is solved to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of our proposed set and models. Full article