Linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations and their application to multi-criteria decision making

Abstract Linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy sets can be regarded as a qualitative form of intuitionistic fuzzy sets. This type of fuzzy sets uses a linguistic membership degree and a linguistic non-membership degree to represent the qualitative preferred and non-preferred judgments of decision makers. Preference relation is a useful and efficient tool for decision making that only requires the decision makers to compare two objects at one time. Taking the advantages of linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy sets and preference relations, this paper introduces linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations (LIFPRs) and studies their application to decision making. To ensure the ranking of objects reasonably, an additive consistency concept is introduced, and several of its desirable properties are discussed. To cope with inconsistent and incomplete LIFPRs, programming model-based methods to derive additively consistent LIFPRs and determine missing values are constructed, respectively. Subsequently, an approach to multi-criteria decision making with LIFPRs is offered, and the application of the new approach is illustrated by using a decision-making problem about evaluating mobile phones.