An outranking approach for hesitant 2-tuple linguistic sets

The hesitant 2-tuple linguistic set (H2TLS), a special case of hesitant 2-tuple linguistic representation model, not only can express the qualitative preferences of the decision makers (DMs), but can effectively reflect their uncertainty and hesitancy with the help of translation parameter containing more than one element assigned to each linguistic variable of the linguistic term set (LTS). This paper develops an outranking method to address the solution to multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problems in the context of hesitant 2-tuple linguistic information. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. One is to propose the outranking relations of H2TLEs based on the proposed directional Hausdorff distance. Another is to establish an outranking method, similar to the ELECTRE method, to solve MCGDM problems in which attributes are evaluated by hesitant 2-tuple linguistic arguments under certain criteria. Last but not the least, a numerical example and a comparison analysis of the results obtained both in the proposed method and fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) method for H2TLSs based on the generalized distance measure are conducted to verify the practicality and effectiveness of the work.