Hesitant fuzzy prioritized operators and their application in multi-criteria group decision making

Hesitant fuzzy set is a very useful technique in the situations where there are some difficulties in determining the membership of an element to a set. Some aggregation methods have been developed for hesitant fuzzy information. Current aggregation methods are under the assumption that the criteria are at the same priority level. However, in real decision making problems, criteria have different priority level commonly. In this paper, we investigated multi-criteria group decision making problems where a prioritization relationship existed over the criteria under hesitant fuzzy environment. Firstly, we propose the hesitant fuzzy prioritized weighted average (HFPWA) and the hesitant fuzzy prioritized weighted geometric (HFPWG) operators. Then, some of their desirable properties are studied in detail. Furthermore, the procedure of multi-criteria group decision making based on the proposed operators is given under hesitant fuzzy environment. Finally, a practical example about talent introduction is provided to illustrate the developed method.