Abstract
•The outranking relations are calculated based on the score function of HFLEs.•A combinative weight determining method is introduced.•We use the weighted Borda rule to aggregate the rankings of individual experts.•Ordinal consensus measures are proposed to identify the reliability of the result.•The integrated HFL-ELECTRE III method is applied to hospital ranking problem.
The ELECTRE (ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité, in French) is an effective multiple criteria decision making method based on comparative analysis. Among the family of the ELECTRE methods and their extensions, the ELECTRE III is widely used since it can tackle uncertain and imprecise information. The hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set can represent people's perceptions more comprehensively and flexibly than exact numbers especially in cognitive complex decision-making process. In this paper, we develop an integrated method based on the ELECTRE III to handle the cognitive complex multiple experts multiple criteria decision making problems in which the cognitive complex information is represented by hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets and the outranking relations between alternatives are calculated by a novel score-function-based distance measure between hesitant fuzzy linguistic elements. A combinative weight-determining method involving both subjective and objective opinions of experts is introduced to derive the weights of criteria. After obtaining the ranking of alternatives from each experts’ decision matrix by the distillation algorithm, the weighted Borda rule is implemented to aggregate the rankings of alternatives regarding different experts. Some ordinal consensus measures are introduced to identify the reliability of the final ranking result. An application of hospital ranking in China is provided to validate the efficiency of the proposed method.