Copyright © 2013 Ding-Hong Peng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We investigate multiple criteria group decision-making problems in which there are priority relationships between the decision elements (criteria and experts), and decision information provided by decision makers takes the form of multigranular uncertain linguistic information. Firstly, some operational laws and possibility degree of multi-granular uncertain linguistic variables are introduced. Then, some new linguistic aggregation operators based on the prioritized aggregation operator, such as the multigranular uncertain linguistic prioritized weighted average (MULPWA) operator and the multigranular uncertain linguistic prioritized ordered weighted average (MULPOWA) operator, are developed and their desirable properties are studied. The prominent characteristics of these proposed operators are that they can aggregate directly the uncertain linguistic variables whose values form the linguistic term sets with different granularities and convey the prioritization phenomenon among the aggregated arguments. Furthermore, based on the MULPWA and MULPOWA operators, an approach to deal with multiple criteria group decision-making problems under multi-granular uncertain linguistic environments is developed. Finally, a practical example is provided to illustrate the multiple criteria group decision-making process.