Developing a novel method for ranking Z -numbers and its application in multi -criteria decision making under uncertain conditions

Decision-making is known as an essential process to specify the productivity and development of organizations, such that several methods have been developed to solve decision-making problems. It is worth mentioning that each method intends to prioritize the effective factors in decision-making so that the decision-maker can take the proper decision. Nevertheless, decision-making problems contain high uncertainty due to human factors and so on. Compared to fuzzy numbers, Z-numbers are more practical and would increase the level of human judgment in making decisions and forecasts under uncertainty. However, as the Z-numbers is a new concept, its theoretical approaches have not yet been demonstrated such as their ranking, in which few methods have been proposed to rank these numbers. This paper develops a novel method for Z-numbers ranking. Compared to the results obtained from some existing ranking methods, this paper reveals that the proposed method obtains the same results for ranking Z-numbers using several examples. But the proposed algorithm is simpler than the existing methods for ranking Z-numbers. Moreover, it can be utilized as an alternative tool to solve the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. Also, through another example, the efficiency of the proposed ranking method in solving the linear system based on Z-numbers was also shown.

کلیدواژه ها:

Z-number ، Z-Linear Programming ، Ranking method ، Decision ، linear system