Z-number dominance, support and opposition relations for multi-criteria decision-making

The outranking multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method focuses on the systematic comparison of alternatives and the non-compensation among criteria to conduct decision analysis. Z-numbers are powerful tools for characterizing decision-making information and identifying information reliability. This paper aims to explore Z-number outranking theo-ries and the corresponding MCDM method on the basis of the idea of Elimination and Choice Translating Reality (ELECTRE) III, which is a very popular and capable outranking model. The concordance and discordance indices of Z-numbers are defined by processing their bimodal uncertainty fully. And an objective computation method is investigated to determine the values of thresholds in these indices. Further, three types of novel outrank-ing relations, including dominance, support and opposition relations, for Z-numbers are presented by comparing these indices systematically. Then, an extended MCDM method with the distillation and flow ranking rules is proposed by detecting the outranking rela-tions among alternatives under multiple criteria and carrying out the outranking aggrega-tion and exploitation. To verify the applicability and effectivity of the proposed method, an illustrative example is provided, and a simulation test and a comparison discussion are conducted (c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.