The extended QUALIFLEX method for multiple criteria decision analysis based on interval type-2 fuzzy sets and applications to medical decision making

QUALIFLEX, a generalization of Jacquet-Lagreze's permutation method, is a useful outranking method in decision analysis because of its flexibility with respect to cardinal and ordinal information. This paper develops an extended QUALIFLEX method for handling multiple criteria decision-making problems in the context of interval type-2 fuzzy sets. Interval type-2 fuzzy sets contain membership values that are crisp intervals, which are the most widely used of the higher order fuzzy sets because of their relative simplicity. Using the linguistic rating system converted into interval type-2 trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, the extended QUALIFLEX method investigates all possible permutations of the alternatives with respect to the level of concordance of the complete preference order. Based on a signed distance-based approach, this paper proposes the concordance/discordance index, the weighted concordance/discordance index, and the comprehensive concordance/discordance index as evaluative criteria of the chosen hypothesis for ranking the alternatives. The feasibility and applicability of the proposed methods are illustrated by a medical decision-making problem concerning acute inflammatory demyelinating disease, and a comparative analysis with another outranking approach is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.