Abstract

Hesitant fuzzy sets have been proposed as an extension of fuzzy sets to address situations in which decision makers exhibit variations in their alternatives' assessment values. However, in real-world problems, the decision-making process has to be accomplished under situations where these assessment values may also drastically change over time. In this paper, we propose a prioritized aggregation operator to combine a time sequence of hesitant fuzzy information, where the time-based hesitancy due to changing environment is mitigated. The proposed method is applied to the service selection problem in service-based systems, where software architects must select as a group the service that has the best combination of features based on their historical assessments. We claim that the time-based hesitant fuzzy information aggregation method addresses the hesitancy at intra- and interexpert levels obtaining more robust decisions.