Aggregating decision information into Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy numbers for heterogeneous multi-attribute group decision making

• A new general method is developed to aggregate heterogeneous information into IFNs.
• A multiple objective IF programming is constructed for determining the attribute weights.
• A novel method is presented to solve heterogeneous MAGDM problems.
• Comparison analyses with existing methods are made.
• The proposed method is used to analyze a CCS provider evaluation problem.

The aim of this paper is to propose a new aggregation method to solve heterogeneous MAGDM problem which involves real numbers, interval numbers, triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs), trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (TrFNs), linguistic values and Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (AIFNs). Firstly, motivated by the relative closeness of technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), we propose a new general method for aggregating crisp values, TFNs, TrFNs and linguistic values into AIFNs. Thus all the group decision matrices for each alternative which involves heterogeneous information are transformed into an Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy decision matrix which only contains AIFNs. To determine the attribute weights, a multiple objective Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy programming model is constructed and solved by converting it into a linear program. Subsequently, comparison analyses demonstrate that the proposed aggregated technology can overcome the drawbacks of existing methods. An example about cloud computing service evaluation is given to verify the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method.

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