Extension of the TODIM Method to Intuitionistic Linguistic Multiple Attribute Decision Making

Practical decision situations are becoming increasingly complicated. It is common for a person to select or rank alternatives with respect to multiple attributes, and the TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multiple attribute decision making) method, which is one of the first multiple attribute decision making (MADM) methods based on prospect theory, has received more attention due to its great performance in considering the bounded rationality of decision makers (DMs). However, the classical TODIM method can only handle the MADM problems with crisp numbers. In this paper, considering that intuitionistic linguistic variables are convenient to describe uncertain or imprecise information, we propose the intuitionistic linguistic TODIM (IL-TODIM) method and intuitionistic uncertain linguistic TODIM (IUL-TODIM) method to solve uncertain MADM problems with IL and IUL variables, respectively. Additionally, a novel distance measure for IUL numbers is developed, based on which we can obtain the corresponding dominance degree of one alternative over another. Finally, examples are provided to show the validity of the proposed methods, and we also conduct a comparison of the results between the IL-TODIM method and the existing intuitionistic fuzzy MADM methods to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.