Complex interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy TODIM approach and its application to group decision making

Abstract

Present work proposes novel fuzzy information based TODIM approaches that can deal with the evaluations under complex interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (CIVIF) environment. The proposed approaches have been referred to as complex interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy-TODIM (CIVIF-TODIM) approaches. The proposed method encompasses the characteristic features of a complex intuitionistic fuzzy set, interval-valued fuzzy set, and TODIM methodology. At first, the definitions associated with CIVIF have been discussed and then the methodological steps involved in classical TODIM have been delineated. The classical TODIM approach is then extended to deal with group decision-making problems under the CIVIF environment. Robustness, effectiveness, applicability, and the improvements made to the extant fuzzy TODIM methods by the proposed methodology have been adjudged through the consideration of illustrative examples solved by the past researcher. Sensitivity analysis with respect to the attenuation factor as well as the criteria weights has been provided to justify the robustness of the proposed methods. A comparative analysis with the existing fuzzy-TODIM approaches has been delineated and a comprehensive analysis of the ranking results obtained for different distance measures at each value of attenuation factor is provided towards the end of the work. The carried out inclusive analysis on the approaches that have been proposed in the present work reveals that the proposed CIVIF fuzzy TODIM approaches are superior to the existing fuzzy TODIM methods. Therefore, the present study provides its contribution to the domain of decision-making framework through the approaches that provide for dealing with complex, uncertain, and linguistic information in an efficient manner.