Enterprises need sustainable development in order to reduce costs and increase income. The cold chain logistics industry needs to promote sustainable supply chains more. As the beginning of the supply chain, the choice of suppliers is particularly important. Considering the risky attitude of decision-makers, an improved hesitant fuzzy TODIM approach is adopted to select suppliers. In order to calculate a more objective indicator weight, the generalized Shapley function of the hesitant fuzzy measure is adopted by analyzing the relationships among indicators. The uncertain supplier evaluation information given by decision-makers is obtained by using hesitant fuzzy information. The improved Interactive and Multi-criteria Decision-Making (TODIM) method based on hesitant fuzzy numbers is used to analyze the psychological behavior of decision-makers under different market prospects and comprehensively rank the candidate suppliers. Finally, a case study of selecting cold chain logistics suppliers is provided to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the method in this paper.

This paper develops a novel group decision-making (GDM) approach for solving multiple-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problems with uncertainty. The hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs) are applied to elicit the decision makers’ linguistic preferences due to their distinguished efficiency and flexibility in representing uncertainty. However, the existing context-free grammar for linguistic description cannot allow generating the linguistic expressions completely free to limit the richness of HFLTSs, and the related methods for dealing with HFLTSs also have limitations in aggregating HFLTSs with different lengths and types. Therefore, this paper proposes extended context-free grammar and a novel GDM approach for HFLTSs, considering the advantages of the rough set theory and OWA operators. The rough set theory can manage the uncertainty existing in the fuzzy representation and deal with HFLTSs represented by the 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic model to get rough number sets. The OWA operator can aggregate these sets with different numbers of elements into an interval simply and objectively. Then, an extended VIKOR method based on the proposed GDM approach for HFLTSs is presented to solve the MCGDM problems. Finally, two examples are given to illustrate the applicability and validity of the developed GDM approach and the hesitant VIKOR method through sensitivity and comparison analysis with other existing approaches.