Evaluating Food Packaging Based on OWA Operators and Distance Measures under Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Environment

Abstract

The quality and safety of food packaging is a primary concern for all consumers, businesses, and governments, and evaluations on food packaging become more and more important. As an extension of linguistic term set and hesitant fuzzy set, hesitant fuzzy linguistic set (HFLS) can be used to describe food packaging evaluation information conveniently. In this paper, a new hesitant fuzzy linguistic multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach for evaluating food packaging is proposed. After reviewing the existing studies of HFLSs, a new order relationship and distance measures between hesitant fuzzy linguistic numbers (HFLNs) are introduced and some linguistic scale functions are utilized. Then, the hesitant fuzzy linguistic hybrid ordered weighted averaging generalized distance (HFLHOWAGD) operator was proposed, and the prominent properties of which were studied. Based on the HFLHOWAGD operator, an approach to MCDM with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information is proposed. Finally, an example is provided to show the feasibility and usability of the method and comparison analyses are made with the existing methods.