An interpretation of intuitionistic fuzzy sets in terms of evidence theory: Decision making aspect

This paper presents a new interpretation of intuitionistic fuzzy sets in the framework of the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence (DST). This interpretation makes it possible to represent all mathematical operations on intuitionistic fuzzy values as the operations on belief intervals. Such approach allows us to use directly the Dempster's rule of combination to aggregate local criteria presented by intuitionistic fuzzy values in the decision making problem. The usefulness of the developed method is illustrated with the known example of multiple criteria decision making problem. The proposed approach and a new method for interval comparison based on DST, allow us to solve multiple criteria decision making problem without intermediate defuzzification when not only criteria, but their weights are intuitionistic fuzzy values. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.