An integrated decision-making approach to evaluating design schemes under heterogeneous fuzzy environment

A few design schemes can be derived using the modularisation strategy, which can effectively reduce the assembling cost and delivery time to the development of product design. Therefore, it is important to select modular architecture design schemes (MADSs) according to evaluation information (fuzzy and uncertain) provided by design experts. As a classic multiple attributes group decision-making problem, the fuzzy theory exhibits a distinct advantage in dealing with the heterogeneous fuzzy information. In this study, an integrated VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) approach was proposed to evaluate MADSs based on a similarity degree model and modified convergent iterative algorithm (MCIA). First, the evaluation measures of MADSs were provided using various types of fuzzy (interval and real) numbers according to the characteristics of the evaluation attributes. Then, the similarity degree between the heterogeneous fuzzy data of individual judgements was used to construct a collective decision matrix, which was obtained by the MCIA. Finally, the weighted VIKOR approach integrated with the Euclidean distance of heterogeneous fuzzy data was presented to derive the compromise solutions of MADSs. A real-world case study on liquid crystal display, method comparisons, and sensitivity analysis demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach for evaluating MADSs under heterogeneous fuzzy environment.