Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Term Sets for Group Decision Making in Supplier Performance Evaluation

Supplier performance evaluation (SPE) is the task of evaluating the performance of a supplier based on various criteria for a particular application. Due to this, SPE is predominantly a multi-criteria decision making problem (MCDM). Since the problem of SPE is qualitative in nature, the decision makers evaluating the supplier find it convenient to express the assessments in the form of linguistic expressions. But there are situations where the decision makers are hesitant about expressing their opinions for the supplier which would enable them to provide their opinions through single linguistic term, for each supplier criterion. Therefore, the assessments are often specified as complex linguistic terms not present in the linguistic term set. To overcome the difficulty of eliciting linguistic information from these complex expressions, we propose to use hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS) in the SPE problem. We show that the use of HFLTS provides advantages that are not possible with the linguistic 2-tuple model. Our work is novel because to the best of our knowledge, HFLTS have not been used for SPE before.