Material selection using an interval 2-tuple linguistic VIKOR method considering subjective and objective weights

Nowadays, selection of an optimal material has become a challenging task for the designers in the design and development of products. Material selection for an engineering design can be viewed as a complicated multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem which requires consideration of a number of available materials and conflicting tangible and intangible selection criteria. Moreover, decision makers tend to use multigranularity linguistic term sets for expressing their assessments because of their different backgrounds and preferences, some of which may be uncertain and incomplete. Therefore, this paper presents an interval 2-tuple linguistic VIKOR (ITL-VIKOR) method for solving the material selection problem under uncertain and incomplete information environment. The new method can not only model the uncertainty and diversity of decision makers' assessment information but also consider the subjective and objective weights of criteria simultaneously in the material selection process. The method has exact characteristic and can avoid information distortion and losing in the linguistic information processing. Finally, two examples are included to demonstrate the feasibility and practicability of the proposed method. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.