Evaluation criterion for different methods of multiple-attribute group decision making with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy information

A number of effective methods for multiple-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IVIFNs) have been proposed in recent years. However, the different methods frequently yield different, even sometimes contradictory, results for the same problem. In this paper a novel criterion to determine the advantages and disadvantages of different methods is proposed. First, the decision-making process is divided into three parts: translation of experts' preferences, aggregation of experts' opinions, and comparison of the alternatives. Experts' preferences aggregation is considered the core step, and the quality of the collective matrix is considered the most important evaluation index for the aggregation methods. Then, methods to calculate the similarity measure, correlation, correlation coefficient, and energy of the intuitionistic fuzzy matrices are proposed, which are employed to evaluate the collective matrix. Thus, the optimal method can be selected by comparing the collective matrices when all the methods yield different results. Finally, a novel approach for aggregating experts' preferences with IVIFN is presented. In this approach, experts' preferences are mapped as points into two-dimensional planes, with the plant growth simulation algorithm (PGSA) being employed to calculate the optimal rally points, which are inversely mapped to IVIFNs to establish the collective matrix. In the study, four different methods are used to address one example problem to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.