'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
Analytic hierarchy process (AHP), as one of the most important methods to tackle multiple
criteria decision-making problems, has achieved much success over the past several decades. Given that
linguistic expressions are much closer than numerical values or single linguistic terms to a human way of
thinking and cognition, this paper investigates the AHP with comparative linguistic expressions. After providing
the snapshot of classical AHP and its fuzzy extensions, we propose the framework of hesitant
fuzzy linguistic AHP, which shows how to yield a decision for qualitative decision-making problems with
complex linguistic expressions. First, the comparative linguistic expressions over criteria or alternatives
are transformed into hesitant fuzzy linguistic elements and then the hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference
relations (HFLPRs) are constructed. Considering that HFLPRs may be inconsistent, we conduct consistency
checking and improving processes after obtaining priorities from the HFLPRs based on a linear programming
method. Regarding the consistency-improving process, we develop a new way to establish a perfectly
consistent HFLPR. The procedure of the hesitant fuzzy linguistic AHP is given in stepwise. Finally,
a numerical example concerning the used-car management in a lemon market is given to illustrate the
ef ciency of the proposed hesitant fuzzy linguistic AHP method.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71771156, in part by the 2019 Sichuan
Planning Project of Social Science under Grant SC18A007, in part by the 2019 Soft Science Project of Sichuan Science and Technology
Department under Grant 2019JDR0141, and in part by the Project of Innovation at Sichuan University under Grant 2018hhs-43