Intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making in the framework of Dempster–Shafer structures

The main emphasis of this paper is placed on the problem of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) in intuitionistic fuzzy environments. Some limitations in the existing literature that explains Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets from the perspective of Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) have been analyzed. To offer an effective solution to the problem of using Dempster's rule to aggregate intuitionistic fuzzy values (IFVs), a novel aggregation operator named ordered weighted averaging (OWA)-based mean orthogonal sum (MOS) is proposed, which has advantages in the following aspects: (1) Dempster's rule is the basis of aggregation, (2) the golden rule-based representative value is the basis for sorting, (3) the idea of soft likelihood function is the guide to improve the fusion process, and (4) OWA operator is a tool to express decision makers' subjectivity. To compare different IFVs obtained from the OWA-based MOS approach, the golden rule-based representative value for IFVs comparison is introduced, which can get over the shortcomings of score functions. The hierarchical structure of the proposed decision approach is presented based on the above researches, which allows us to address MCDM issues without intermediate defuzzification when criteria and associated weights are represented by IFVs. The proposed OWA-based MOS approach is illustrated as a more flexible decision method, which can better solve the problem of intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making in the framework of DST.