Extending the linguistic decision suite FLINTSTONES to deal with comparative linguistic expressions with symbolic translation information

Abstract

Uncertainty is so common in real decision situations that it has given rise to a new decision making approach so-called linguistic decision making, in which such uncertainty is modeled by using linguistic information. Many contributions have been proposed in order to solve LDM problems by following a Computing with Words (CW) approach to obtain linguistic outputs from linguistic premises by emulating the human beings’ reasoning process. Nowadays, there are several LDM models that, together with the complexity of LDM problems, make almost impossible to find a proper solution for these problems without a support tool. FLINTSTONES is a fuzzy decision support system that facilitates the decision process in LDM problems. This software aimed to solve LDM problems by means of the 2-tuple linguistic model, whose main advantages are high interpretability and precision of the results. However, it has other drawbacks such as the modeling of linguistic information by using solely single linguistic terms or the impossibility to model the experts’ hesitancy. Recently, the Extended Comparative Linguistic Expressions with Symbolic Translation (ELICIT) linguistic representation model was introduced in order to overcome existing drawbacks in terms of interpretability and accuracy in CW processes. This model allows to model experts’ hesitancy and, at the same time, carry out precise linguistic computations and provide interpretable results, overcoming the limitations of previous LDM models. Therefore, this contribution presents an updated version of FLINTSTONES able to manage ELICIT information in LDM problems and which integrates the ELICIT CW approach.