A two-phase fuzzy decision-making method based on multigranular linguistic assessment

Abstract

In general, the decision-makers or experts should evaluate and select the best alternative from the huge number of decision alternatives. Under this situation, it is difficult for decision-maker to make the right comparison between alternatives and choose the best one in a short time. The aim of this paper is to present a two-phase fuzzy decision-making method to deal with the kind of decision problems. In this paper, experts’ opinions can be expressed by different types of 2-tuple linguistic variables. Experts’ opinions are including the performance of each alternative with respect to each criterion and the weight of each criterion. The proposed method was divided into two phases to reach the final decision. First, some unsuitable alternatives will be eliminated to reduce the number of decision alternatives. And then, the ranking order of the rest alternatives will be determined by a systematic method. Therefore, linguistic ELECTRE are used at the first phase to eliminate some unsuitable alternatives in accordance with pair-wise comparison among all alternatives. At the second phase, the linguistic TOPSIS are used to determine the total ranking order of the rest alternatives by closeness coefficient of each alternative. Finally, an example is shown to highlight the procedure of the proposed method and the conclusion is discussed at the end of this paper. Key words: Two-phase fuzzy MCDM, 2-tuple linguistic variable, ELECTRE, TOPSIS.