A Novel Multicriteria Group Decision-Making Approach with Hesitant Picture Fuzzy Linguistic Information

In real-life group decision-making environment, different decision-makers (DMs) might be hesitant to provide their evaluation by more than two linguistic terms with positive, neutral, negative, and refusal information (e.g., attitude for support, neutral, oppose, and refusal) for criteria of alternative. In order to solve such kinds of decision-making problems, a novel definition of hesitant picture fuzzy linguistic sets ( HPFLSs ) is introduced, and the HPFLS-based methods are developed. Considering the operation laws appeared in previous papers are not well suitable for HPFLS operation, the novel operation laws of HPFLSs are developed. Then, two aggregation operators of HPFLSs are developed, including hesitant picture fuzzy linguistic weighted average operator ( HPFLSWA ) and hesitant picture fuzzy linguistic weighted geometric operator ( HPFLSGA ). Meanwhile, the related proofs are given in detail. Additionally, the comparison method of score and accuracy functions is provided to rank the alternative. Finally, a real-life case of teaching performance evaluation is used to verify the proposed methods. The same case-based comparisons are further conducted between the proposed method and previous methods. The results showed that the proposed method can well overcome the lack of operation rules appeared in previous multicriteria group decision-making ( MCGDM ) methods and demonstrate effectiveness.