An MAGDM Approach Combining Numerical Values with Uncertain Linguistic Information and Its Application in Evaluation of R&D Projects

In multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems, decision attributes of alternatives are often considered as with quantitative and qualitative information. Therefore decision making problems may include preference information in different formats. In this paper, a multi-attribute group decision making model based on numerical and uncertain linguistic information is investigated. Uncertain linguistic information reflects the subjectivity and uncertainty of evaluation with respect to qualitative attributes. A transformation function and an extended TOPSIS procedure are proposed to deal with this MAGDM model with numerical and uncertain linguistic information. In order to implement the TOPSIS procedure, the distance of interval numbers and the distance of n-dimensional interval numbers are defined, they are both in form of interval numbers to preserve the uncertainty of original information. The proposed approach is illustrated by a numerical example, and is applied in the evaluation of R&D projects in the final part of the paper.