Selection of IT outsourcing services’ activities considering services cost and risks by designing an interval-valued hesitant fuzzy-decision approach

Abstract

In current global business, outsourcing of information technology (IT) has become a growing approach. In this respect, selecting a service activity of IT outsourcing as well as IT outsourcing projects could be designed based on multi-criteria decision-making frameworks. This study proposes a new decision-making approach based on group decision analysis under interval-valued hesitant fuzzy (IVHF)-environment to rank the IT outsourcing services’ activities. The IVHFSs could assist the decision makers by assigning some interval-values membership degrees for an IT outsourcing services’ activities among the conflict criteria under a set to margin of errors. For this purpose, the preferences and opinions of decision makers are expressed by linguistic terms, which are converted to interval-valued hesitant fuzzy elements. In the proposed approach, the weights of criteria and decision makers are computed based on interval-valued hesitant fuzzy preference evaluation method and interval-valued hesitant fuzzy utility degree method, respectively. Consequently, the criteria and decision makers’ weights are provided in the procedure of proposed evaluating and ranking approach to decrease the errors. In addition, the decision makers’ judgments are aggregated in the last step of the proposed approach to avoid the loss of data. Finally, the proposed interval-valued hesitant fuzzy approach is implemented to a real case study to indicate the applicability of the presented approach. In addition, a comparative analysis is provided to discuss the obtained results.