A new evaluation methodology for quality goals extended by D number theory and FAHP

Abstract

Evaluation of quality goals is an important issue in process management, which essentially is a multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problem. The process of assessment inevitably involves uncertain information. The two crucial points in an MADM problem are to obtain weight of attributes and to handle uncertain information. D number theory is a new mathematical tool to deal with uncertain information, which is an extension of evidence theory. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) provides a hierarchical way to model MADM problems, and the comparison analysis among attributes is applied to obtain the weight of attributes. FAHP uses a triangle fuzzy number rather than a crisp number to represent the evaluation information, which fully considers the hesitation to give a evaluation. Inspired by the features of D number theory and FAHP, a D-FAHP method is proposed to evaluate quality goals in this paper. Within the proposed method, FAHP is used to obtain the weight of each attribute, and the integration property of D number theory is carried out to fuse information. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Some necessary discussions are provided to illustrate the advantages of the proposed method.