Belief and Plausibility Measures on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets with Construction of Belief-Plausibility TOPSIS

Abstract

Belief and plausibility measures in Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) and fuzzy sets are known as different approaches for representing partial, uncertainty, and imprecise information. There are several generalizations of DST to fuzzy sets proposed in the literature. But, less generalization of DST to intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs), that can somehow present imprecise information better than fuzzy sets, was proposed. In this paper, we first propose a simple and intuitive way to construct a generalization of DST to IFSs with degrees of belief and plausibility in terms of degrees of membership and nonmembership, respectively. We then give belief and plausibility measures on IFSs and construct belief-plausibility intervals (BPIs) of IFSs. Based on the constructed BPIs, we first use Hausdorff metric to define the distance between two BPIs and then establish similarity measures in the generalized context of DST to IFSs. By employing the techniques of ordered preference similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), the proposed belief and plausibility measures on IFSs in the framework of DST enable us to construct a belief-plausibility TOPSIS for solving multicriteria decision-making problems. Some examples are presented to manifest that the proposed method is reasonable, applicable, and well suited in the environment of IFSs in the framework of generalization of DST.