Solving New Product Selection Problem by a New Hierarchical Group Decision-making Approach with Hesitant Fuzzy Setting

Abstract

Selecting the most suitable alternative under uncertainty is considered as a critical decision-making problem that affects the success of organizations. In the selection process, there are a number of assessment criteria, considered by a group of decision makers, which often could be established in a multi-level hierarchy structure. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new hierarchical multiple criteria group decision-making (HMCGDM) approach in hesitant fuzzy setting based on the concept of compromise solutions. Motivated by hesitant fuzzy sets, Hamming distance measure is utilized in the process of the proposed hierarchical method, namely HF-HMCGDM, and also hesitant fuzzy weighted averaging operator is used to aggregate the judgments of experts or decision makers. Firstly, for assessing weights of criteria, a hesitant fuzzy hierarchical weighting method is developed. To rank the possible alternatives, a new hesitant fuzzy extension of the classical compromise solution method is then proposed. Furthermore, a case study in the new product ideas problem from the recent literature is provided to illustrate the proposed HF-HMCGDM approach, and finally a comparative analysis is given to demonstrate the capability.