A farmland choice based on hesitant fuzzy linguistic preferences relations

A new type of fuzzy preference structure, called hesitant linguistic preference relations, is developed in order to describe uncertain evaluation information in group decision-making (GDM) farmland choice. Moreover, it allows decision makers to offer all possible linguistic terms that are not accounted for in current preference structure types when we compare two alternatives. Systematic aggregation operators are proposed to aggregate hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. In addition, an approach to GDM based on PROMETHEE method concepts and hesitant linguistic preference relations is developed to take into account the differences in opinions between individual decision makers. An agriculture real case study is implemented to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed method. Also, a sensitivity analysis is carried out to reveal the effect of the criteria weighting variations on the originally obtained ranking.