A thermodynamic method of intuitionistic fuzzy MCDM to assist the hierarchical medical system in China

Abstract

Thermodynamics is of knowledge structure to depict the stability (or instability) of a system effectively. For the increasing complexity of the application problems and the fuzzy nature of human thought, intuitionistic fuzzy sets were proposed and have become a powerful tool to portray the uncertainty of things. In order to best utilize decision information to solve the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems in an intuitionistic fuzzy environment, the paper proposes a thermodynamic method for MCDM with intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IFNs), which not only utilizes the quantity of the decision information to make decision, but also concerns the quality of the decision information in the decision making process. Then, we conduct simulations to compare the decision making results derived by the proposed method and other two commonly used decision making methods -Weighted averaging operator (WAO) and TOPSIS in the intuitionistic fuzzy environment. Further, the thermodynamic method for MCDM with IFNs is applied to assist the hierarchical medical system in West China Hospital as a case study.* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: renpeijia@outlook.com, xuzeshui@263.net, liaohuchang@163.com, x.zeng@manchester.ac.uk. 2The empirical results derived from the simulations and applications show: (1) If the optimal selections obtained from the proposed method and one of the two commonly used methods are same, then it is likely that the three decision making methods would obtain same results; (2) If the optimal selections by the three method are different, then it is often the cases where the selection by the proposed method is different from the two other methods whereas the selections by the two other methods are the same. The reason behind is the unique feature of the proposed method in which the quality of the decision making information is taken into consideration. These empirical studies demonstrate that the quality of the decision making information has significant impacts on the decision making results, which indicates that the proposed method is effective to be utilized in practical decision making problems.

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