Aggregation operators for hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets with an application in MADM

The hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) was originally presented to tackle the situation where the experts are hesitant between several linguistic terms to assess a linguistic variable. One basic problem in multiple attribute decision making (MADM) with HFLTSs is the aggregation of HFLTSs. This paper aims at providing a possibility distribution based approach to carry out the aggregation process. The concept of possibility distribution for an HFLTS is first introduced which is a natural way to deal with the possible information contained in an HFLTS. Two kinds of aggregation operators are presented which are extensions of the weighted average operator and the ordered weighted average operator. A procedure to solve MADM with HFLTSs is proposed by use of the presented aggregation operators. A numerical example is given to verify the proposed approach.