Interval-Valued Hesitant Fuzzy Hamacher Synergetic Weighted Aggregation Operators and Their Application to Shale Gas Areas Selection

We investigate the multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem concerns on the selection of shale gas areas with interval-valued hesitant fuzzy information. First, some Hamacher operations of interval-valued hesitant fuzzy information are introduced, which generalize and extend the existing ones. Then some interval-valued hesitant fuzzy Hamacher weighted aggregation operators, especially, the interval-valued hesitant fuzzy Hamacher synergetic weighted averaging (IVHFHSWA) operators and their geometric version (IVHFHSWG) operators that weight simultaneously the argument variables themselves and their position orders and thus generalize the ideas of the weighted averaging and the ordered weighted averaging, are proposed. The distinct advantages of these operators are that they can provide more choices for the decision makers and considerably enhance or deteriorate the performance of aggregation. The essential properties of these operators are studied and their specific cases are discussed. Based on the IVHFHSWA operator, we propose a practical approach to shale gas areas selection with interval-valued hesitant fuzzy information. Finally, an illustrative example for selecting the shale gas areas is used to demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed approach and a comparative analysis is performed with other approaches to highlight the distinctive advantages of the proposed operators.