Group Decision Making with Triangular Fuzzy Linguistic Variables

In group decision making with linguistic information, the decision makers (DMs) usually provide their assessment information by means of linguistic variables. In some situations, however, the DMs may provide fuzzy linguistic information because of time pressure, lack of knowledge, and their limited attention and information processing capabilities. In this paper, we introduce the concepts of triangular fuzzy linguistic variable and its member function, and introduce some operational laws of triangular fuzzy linguistic variables. We propose a formula for comparing triangular fuzzy linguistic variables, and develop some operators for aggregating triangular fuzzy linguistic variables, such as the fuzzy linguistic averaging (FLA) operator, fuzzy linguistic weighted averaging (FLWA) operator, fuzzy linguistic ordered weighted averaging (FLOWA) operator, and induced FLOWA (IFLOWA) operator, etc. Based on the FLWA and IFLOWA operators, we develop a practical method for group decision making with triangular fuzzy linguistic variables, and finally, an illustrative example is given to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed method.