Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Maclaurin Symmetric Mean Operators and their Applications to Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Problem.

Due to the limitation of knowledge and the vagueness of human being thinking, decision makers prefer to use hesitant fuzzy linguistic sets (HFLSs) to estimate alternatives. Some methods of HFLSs have been researched based on the more familiar means such as the arithmetic mean and the geometric mean; however, Maclaurin symmetric mean (MSM) that can be used to reflect the interrelationships among input arguments have not been applied to solve hesitant fuzzy linguistic multi-criteria decision-making problems. In this paper, two hesitant fuzzy linguistic harmonic averaging operators are proposed: the hesitant fuzzy linguistic MSM (HFLMSM) operator and the hesitant fuzzy linguistic weighted MSM (HFLWMSM) operator. Furthermore, an approach based on the HFLWMSM operator is proposed. Finally, to verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed approach, an illustrative example and corresponding comparison analysis are presented in the end. (C) 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.