A new approach to DEMATEL based on interval-valued hesitant fuzzy sets

Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory is a widely used method to analyze and visualize the structure of complex systems through matrices and digraphs. The method typically requires dealing with substantial uncertainties and subjectivities inherent in the judgment process. A review of the literature shows that several extensions of DEMATEL have been suggested so far dealing with a variety of sources of uncertainty. However, the uncertainty originating from the human doubt that might arise in the assignment of membership degrees during the assessments is partly or entirely ignored in these studies. To address this problem, this study proposes a new interval-valued hesitant fuzzy approach to DEMATEL, which has the ability to explicitly deal with hesitancy in expert assessments and offer a better representation of uncertainty. To justify the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed approach, an illustrative example is provided where the proposed approach is compared to the classical crisp and fuzzy DEMATEL approaches.