A new extension to PROMETHEE under intuitionistic fuzzy environment for solving supplier selection problem with linguistic preferences

Abstract This paper presents a new two-tier decision making framework with linguistic preferences for scientific decision making. The major reason for adopting linguistic preference is to ease the process of rating of alternatives by allowing decision makers (DMs) to strongly emphasize their opinion on each alternative. In the first tier, aggregation is done using a newly proposed operator called linguistic based aggregation (LBA), which aggregates linguistic terms directly without making any conversion. The main motivation for this proposal is driven by the previous studies on aggregation theory which reveals that conversion leads to loss of information and formation of virtual sets which are no longer sensible and rational for decision making process. Secondly, in the next tier, a new ranking method called IFSP (intuitionistic fuzzy set based PROMETHEE) is proposed which is an extension to PROMETHEE (preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation) under intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) context. Unlike previous ranking methods, this ranking method follows a new formulation by considering personal choice of the DMs over each alternative. The main motivation for such formulation is derived from the notion of not just obtaining a suitable alternative but also coherently satisfying the DMs’ viewpoint during decision process. Finally, the practicality of the framework is tested by using supplier selection (SS) problem for an automobile factory. The strength and weakness of the proposed LBA-IFSP framework are verified by comparing with other methods under the realm of theoretical and numerical analysis. The results from the analysis infer that proposed LBA-IFSP framework is rationally coherent to DMs’ viewpoint, moderately consistent with other methods and highly stable and robust against rank reversal issue.