Multi-criteria decision making with fuzzy linguistic preference relations

Although the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the extent analysis method (EAM) of fuzzy AHP are extensively adopted in diverse fields, inconsistency increases as hierarchies of criteria or alternatives increase because AHP and EAM require rather complicated pairwise comparisons amongst elements (attributes or alternatives). Additionally, decision makers normally find that assigning linguistic variables to judgments is simpler and more intuitive than to fixed value judgments. Hence, Wang and Chen proposed fuzzy linguistic preference relations (Fuzzy LinPreRa) to address the above problem. This study adopts Fuzzy LinPreRa to re-examine three numerical examples. The re-examination is intended to compare our results with those obtained in earlier works and to demonstrate the advantages of Fuzzy LinPreRa. This study demonstrates that, in addition to reducing the number of pairwise comparisons, Fuzzy LinPreRa also increases decision making efficiency and accuracy. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.