Three-way multi-attribute decision making under hesitant fuzzy environments

In decision making processes, an expert with hesitant attitudes may experience difficulties when evaluating alternatives via a single assessment value. By allowing the membership degree of an element to a set represented by several possible values, hesitant fuzzy sets (HFSs) are usually needed to address this situation. Thus, it is meaningful to put forward a kind of multi-attribute decision making (MADM) method in the hesitant fuzzy (HF) environment. In addition, three-way decision (3WD) is a decision making method by introducing the idea of non-commitments, and it can effectively reduce decision risks. In this paper, the 3WD method-based MADM with HF information is proposed. According to the information table, the membership function of an objective HFS is given. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by solving an infectious disease diagnosis problem. Finally, we give a comparative analysis between the proposed method and the existing HF MADM methods. Further, three experimental results show that the proposed method is reasonable and effective. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper introduces the use of hesitant fuzzy and three-way decision methods in decision making to address difficulties in evaluating alternative solutions and reducing decision risks. The effectiveness and rationality of the proposed method are verified through experiments, and comparative analysis with existing HF MADM methods is provided.