A Ranking Approach for Intuitionistic Fuzzy Numbers and its Application

To the best of our knowledge very few methods have been proposed in previous studies for comparing intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) numbers. In this paper, the limitations and the shortcomings of all these existing methods are pointed out. In order to overcome these limitations and shortcomings a new ranking approach—by modifying an existing ranking approach—is proposed for comparing IF numbers. Thus, with the help of proposed the ranking approach, a new method is proposed to find the optimal solution of such unbalanced minimum cost flow (MCF) problems in which all the parameters are represented by IF numbers.