A novel hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets approach and its application on acceptance sampling plans

Abstract

Hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) is an approach giving ability to obtain more flexible decision-making (DM) process by integrating linguistic fuzzy modeling (LFM) with hesitative expert judgments. Although HFLTS is widely -studied in the literature and many enhancements are made on HFLTS procedure, none of these enhancements gives ability to continue with precise fuzzy modeling (PFM) in decision process. LFM has a big drawback about accuracy because of the dependency between the size of term set and the comprehensiveness of fuzzy sets (FSs). This issue creates a very critical difficulty in modeling of DM problems that need sensitive evaluations by using HFLTS. This paper aims to solve this problem by proposing a novel HFLTS methodology that is usable for DM problems that need sensitive calculations in the decision stage. The proposed methodology integrates 2-tuple LFM and linguistic fuzzy modifiers with HFLTS to overcome the accuracy problem and obtain more sensitive and flexible decision procedure. This paper also presents an envelopment transformation technique to aggregate expert assessments as a fuzzy membership function instead of membership grades. It becomes possible to keep interpretability in a certain level and achieve sensitive results at the same time with the help of these modifications. The proposed HFLTS approach is analyzed on a real case example from manufacturing industry for acceptance sampling plans (ASP) that is a DM problem requiring sensitive calculations. As another originality of the paper, the main formulations of ASP are derived based on hesitant fuzzy defectiveness information. The obtained results are also compared with some existing enhancements of the HFLTS and the success of the proposed methodology is proved in terms of sensitive calculation.