Ranking of fuzzy numbers by sign distance

Several different strategies have been proposed for ranking of fuzzy numbers. These include methods based on the coefficient of variation (CV index), distance between fuzzy sets, centroid point and original point, and weighted mean value. Each of these techniques has been shown to produce non-intuitive results in certain cases. In this paper we propose a modification of the distance based approach called the sign distance, which is both efficient to evaluate and able to overcome the shortcomings of the previous techniques. The calculation of the proposed method is far simpler than the other approaches. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.