Abstract
As a useful information representation tool, hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) allows decision makers (DMs) to express their cognitive preferences in terms of several ordered and continuous linguistic terms. Considering the fact that much valuable information related to the cognitive behavior of DMs is hidden in the original evaluation information, this paper studies how to comprehensively mine uncertain information from original hesitant fuzzy linguistic evaluation information given by DMs. To address this objective, we present a new representation tool, normal wiggly hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (NWHFLTS), which not only retains the original evaluation information, but also delivers and quantifies potential uncertain information, and can also help DMs express their evaluation information in a more complete manner. First, we develop the basic operations, score function, and comparison rule of NWHFLTS based on linguistic scale functions (LSFs), and propose the projection measure, the normal projection measure, and the normalized projection-based distance measure to describe the degree of deviation between two NWHFLTSs. Furthermore, for the case when the attribute weight is completely unknown, we combine the multiattributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) method and develop a new method called as normal wiggly hesitant fuzzy linguistic projection-based MABAC to solve the multiattribute decision-making problems where attribute values are expressed in the form of NWHFLTS. Finally, through a practical example of marine ecological security situation, the specific calculation steps of this method are exemplified, the feasibility and advancement of the proposed method are demonstrated via a comprehensive comparative study.