ABSTRACT
The theory of intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) is widely used for dealing with vagueness and the Dempster--Shafer (D-S) evidence theory has a widespread use in multiple criteria decision-making problems under uncertain situation. However, there are many methods to aggregate intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IFNs), but the aggregation operator to fuse basic probability assignment (BPA) is rare. Power average (P-A) operator, as a powerful operator, is useful and important in information fusion. Motivated by the idea of P-A power, in this paper, a new operator based on the IFS and D-S evidence theory is proposed, which is named as intuitionistic fuzzy evidential power average (IFEPA) aggregation operator. First, an IFN is converted into a BPA, and the uncertainty is measured in D-S evidence theory. Second, the difference between BPAs is measured by Jousselme distance and a satisfying support function is proposed to get the support degree between each other effectively. Then the IFEPA operator is used for aggregating the original IFN and make a more reasonable decision. The proposed method is objective and reasonable because it is completely driven by data once some parameters are required. At the same time, it is novel and interesting. Finally, an application of developed models to the ‘One Belt, One road’ investment decision-making problems is presented to illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed operator.
Acknowledgments
The authors greatly appreciate the reviews’ suggestions and the editor's encouragement.
Disclosure statement
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Wen Jiang
Jiang Wen was born in Hunan, P. R. China. She received the Bachelor degree in signal and system from Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, China, in 1994, the Master degree in Image processing from Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, China, in 1997, the Ph. D. degree in systems engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China, in 2009. She is currently a professor in school of electronics & information, Northwestern Polytechnical University. Her research interests are in the areas of information fusion and Intelligent Information Processing.
Boya Wei
Boya Wei was born in Shanxi, P. R. China, in 1993. She received the Bachelor degree in Electronics & Information Engineering from North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, China, in 2015. She is currently a master student in School of Electronics & Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University. Her research interests are in the areas of information fusion, aggregation operators and complex networks.