Trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized aggregation operators and application to multi-attribute decision making

In some multi-attribute decision making (MADM) problems, various relationships among the decision attributes should be considered. This paper investigates the prioritization relationship of attributes in MADM with trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (TrIFNs). TrIFNs are a special intuitionistic fuzzy set on a real number set and have the better capability to model ill-known quantities. Firstly, the weighted possibility means of membership and non-membership functions for TrIFNs are defined. Hereby, a new lexicographic ranking method for TrIFNs is presented. Then, a series of trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized aggregation operators are developed, including the trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized score (TrIFPS) operator, trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized weighted average (TrIFPWA) operator, trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized “and” (TrIFP-AND) operator and trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy prioritized “or” (TrIFP-OR) operator. Some desirable properties of these operators are also discussed. By utilizing the TrIFPWA operator, the attribute values of alternatives are integrated into the overall ones, which are used to rank the alternatives. Thus, a new method is proposed for solving the prioritized MADM problems with TrIFNs. Finally, the applicability of the proposed method is illustrated with a supply chain collaboration example.