Intuitionistic preference relations and their application in group decision making

Intuitionistic fuzzy set, characterized by a membership function and a non-membership function, was introduced by Atanassov [Intuitionistic fuzzy sets, Fuzzy Sets and Systems 20 (1986) 87-96]. In this paper, we define the concepts of intui-tionistic preference relation, consistent intuitionistic preference relation, incomplete intuitionistic preference relation and acceptable intuitionistic preference relation, and study their various properties. We develop an approach to group decision making based on intuitionistic preference relations and an approach to group decision making based on incomplete intuitionistic preference relations respectively, in which the intuitionistic fuzzy arithmetic averaging operator and intuitionistic fuzzy weighted arithmetic averaging operator are used to aggregate intuitionistic preference information, and the score function and accuracy function are applied to the ranking and selection of alternatives. Finally, a practical example is provided to illustrate the developed approaches. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.