An extended outranking approach for multi-criteria decision-making problems with linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy numbers

Linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (LIFNs), characterized by a linguistic membership degree, linguistic non-membership degree, and linguistic indeterminacy degree, represent a helpful tool for depicting uncertain information under complex environments. This paper focuses on developing an innovative method to address multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems with LIFNs in which the weight information is completely unknown. First, the distance of LIFNs is defined with the aid of linguistic scale functions (LSFs). Second, some extended outranking relationships between each pair of LIFNs are proposed based on the elicitation of the classic relation models. Moreover, a ranking method is constructed to deal with MCDM problems according to the proposed outranking relationships of LIFNs. Finally, an illustrative example concerning coal mine safety evaluation is provided to demonstrate the proposed method, and its feasibility and validity are further verified by a sensitivity analysis and comparison with other existing methods. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.