Several extensions and generalizations of fuzzy sets have been introduced in the literature, for example, Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets, type 2 fuzzy sets, and fuzzy multisets. In this paper, we propose hesitant fuzzy sets. Although from a formal point of view, they can be seen as fuzzy multisets, we will show that their interpretation differs from the two existing approaches for fuzzy multisets. Because of this, together with their definition, we also introduce some basic operations. In addition, we also study their relationship with intuitionistic fuzzy sets. We prove that the envelope of the hesitant fuzzy sets is an intuitionistic fuzzy set. We prove also that the operations we propose are consistent with the ones of intuitionistic fuzzy sets when applied to the envelope of the hesitant fuzzy sets.

Intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) are a generalization of fuzzy sets where the membership is an interval. That is, membership, instead of being a single value, is an interval. A large number of operations have been defined for this type of fuzzy sets, and several applications have been developed in the last years. In this paper we describe hesitant fuzzy sets. They are another generalization of fuzzy sets. Although similar in intention to IFS, some basic differences on their interpretation and on their operators exist. In this paper we review their definition, the main results and we present an extension principle, which permits to generalize existing operations on fuzzy sets to this new type of fuzzy sets. We also discuss their use in decision making.

One of the properties that the OWA operator satisfies is commutativity. This condition, that is not satisfied by the weighted mean, stands for equal reliability of all the information sources that supply the data. In this article we define a new combination function, the WOWA (Weighted OWA), that combines the advantages of the OWA operator and the ones of the weighted mean. We study some of its properties and show how it can be extended to deal with linguistic labels. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The necessity of dealing with uncertainty in real world problems has been a long-term research challenge that has originated different methodologies and theories. Fuzzy sets along with their extensions, such as type-2 fuzzy sets, interval-valued fuzzy sets, and Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets, have provided a wide range of tools that are able to deal with uncertainty in different types of problems. Recently, a new extension of fuzzy sets so-called hesitant fuzzy sets has been introduced to deal with hesitant situations, which were not well managed by the previous tools. Hesitant fuzzy sets have attracted very quickly the attention of many researchers that have proposed diverse extensions, several types of operators to compute with such types of information, and eventually some applications have been developed. Because of such a growth, this paper presents an overview on hesitant fuzzy sets with the aim of providing a clear perspective on the different concepts, tools and trends related to this extension of fuzzy sets.