FLINTSTONES 2.0 an Open and Comprehensive Fuzzy Tool for Multi-criteria Decision Analysis

Abstract

Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) deals with the process of making decisions among a number of experts who evaluate several alternatives or solutions over different criteria. Real-world MCDM problems often present changing contexts in which uncertainty has not a probabilistic nature, in such cases, linguistic information has been successfully applied to model such uncertainty. The use of linguistic information in decision making implies making computations with it to solve linguistic MCDM problems, under these conditions, computing with words methodology allows to obtain linguistic outputs from linguistic premises. There is a large amount of computational models to carry out these processes in the specialized literature, being often difficult to make comparison among different models for a specific MCDM problem. Both the large number of existing models and the increasing difficulty of MCDM problems make difficult the resolution of such problems for the decision makers without any additional support. Therefore, the need of decision support tools that consider all relevant information seems evident. For this reason, FLINTSTONES was proposed as a software suite for dealing with MCDM problems within linguistic contexts based on the 2-tuple linguistic model. This contribution presents an updated version, FLINTSTONES 2.0, that includes new useful features for supporting MCDM resolution processes.