Hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs) is an important decision-making tool for qualitative evaluation, and the distance measures between HFLTSs have been widely concerned. The purpose of this paper is to overcome the defects of the existing distance measures between HFLTSs and propose some improved and more reasonable distance measures of HFLTSs. Firstly, we find that the existing HFLTSs distance measures do not satisfy basic properties such as triangle inequality through analysis. Additionally, considering that the existing distance measures do not think about the influence of the different number of linguistic terms on the calculated results, some distance measures considering both the decision-makers’ hesitance degree and linguistic term values are further proposed. The developed distance measures not only satisfy the basic properties but also avoid the loss of decision information. Finally, the developed distance measures are applied to the field of judicial execution and compared with the calculation results of the existing distance measures. The results show that the developed distance measures are more consistent with the actual decision-making process, which is helpful in improving the quality of decision-making.

The phenomenon of the judgment debtor evading the execution of legal documents and concealing his property by improper means has become increasingly prominent in China, which seriously affects the realization of the people’s legitimate rights and interests. To protect the legitimate rights and interests of the people, it is necessary to study the law enforcement possibility evaluation of judgment debtors and quickly judge which judgment debtor is likely to complete the legal documents. A novel hybrid TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for Interative Multi-criteria Decision Making) method for evaluating the law enforcement possibility of judgment debtors is developed. The main idea of the hybrid TODIM method is to obtain the relative possibility value of judgment debtors by comparing the attribute values between two judgment debtors and aggregating all the attributes’ differences. The result shows that the hybrid TODIM method fully considers the psychological and behavioral factors of the law enforcement officers in the evaluation process. The evaluation result is more in line with the law enforcement officers’ experience in handling execution cases. Compared with the hybrid TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) method, the hybrid TODIM method is more suitable for solving the problem.

Many judgment debtors try to evade, confront, and delay law enforcement using concealing and transferring their property to resist law enforcement in China. The act of hiding property seriously affects people’s legitimate rights and interests and China’s legal authority. Therefore, it is essential to find an effective method of analyzing whether a judgment debtor hides property. Aiming at the hidden property analysis problem, we propose a case-based reasoning method for the judgment debtor’s hidden property analysis. In the hidden property analysis process, we present the attributes of the enforcement case by crisp symbols, crisp numbers, interval numbers, and fuzzy linguistic variables and develop a hybrid similarity measure between the historical enforcement case and the target enforcement case. The results show that the recommendations obtained with the information and knowledge of similar historical cases are consistent with judicial practice, which can reduce the work pressure of law enforcement officers and improve the efficiency of handling enforcement cases.

The fuzzy clustering algorithm has become a research hotspot in many fields because of its better clustering effect and data expression ability. However, little research focuses on the clustering of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs). To fill in the research gaps, we extend the data type of clustering to hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. A kind of hesitant fuzzy linguistic agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm is proposed. Furthermore, we propose a hesitant fuzzy linguistic Boole matrix clustering algorithm and compare the two clustering algorithms. The proposed clustering algorithms are applied in the field of judicial execution, which provides decision support for the executive judge to determine the focus of the investigation and the control. A clustering example verifies the clustering algorithm’s effectiveness in the context of hesitant fuzzy linguistic decision information.