A Novel Enhanced Supplier Selection Method Used for Handling Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Information

Today's competitive businesses have been shifted from the company-to-company competition model to the supply chain-to-supply chain competition model. The selection of the most suitable supplier determines customer satisfaction and enterprise competitive advantage. However, the typical supplier selection approaches did not consider the ordered weights between the evaluations of attribute values, resulting in distorted assessment result. Moreover, experts often uncertainly decide the exact value of the evaluation attribute's rating, have linguistic term sets equivocation, or give ambiguous information, which increase the difficulty of the supplier evaluation process. To deal with the aforementioned problem, we have proposed a novel enhanced supplier selection method for handling hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. To verify the approach, by taking network security system assessment as an example to explain the use of the proposed novel enhanced supplier selection method, the calculation result is compared with the result of the arithmetic average and symbolic methods. The results show that the proposed novel enhanced supplier selection method is more accurate and reasonable and can better reflect real situations.