Qualitative cross impact analysis using hesitant fuzzy sets

Qualitative Cross Impact Analysis is a futures research tool used to explore both direct and indirect relationships of variables in a system to structure and formalize judgmental forecasting. The analysis, dealing with future events, often involves uncertain information and highly subjective judgments which can be better handled using fuzzy sets rather than subjective crisp numbers. However, fuzzy sets present limitations to model the uncertainty originating from hesitation that might arise in the assignment of membership degrees of the elements to a fuzzy set. Since the assessment process in Qualitative Cross Impact Analysis requires the participation of a variety of experts, dealing with this type of uncertainty becomes even more crucial. To address this issue this paper proposes a hesitant fuzzy approach to qualitative cross impact analysis and provides an illustrative example.