The Assessment of Airline Service Performance with Dependent Evaluation Criteria by Generalized QFD and SAW Under Interval-Valued Fuzzy Environment

Abstract

For airlines, service is regarded as an essential item in their enterprises, and thus they emphasize service performance on management. Due to varied messages’ imprecision and vagueness, the assessment of airline service performance is a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (FMCDM) problem for management. In FMCDM problems, classical multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods, including simple additive weighting (SAW), have been extended into FMCDM methods to encompass imprecise and vague messages. The generalizations were first used in FMCDM with independent evaluation criteria, and then FMCDM could be further associated with quality function deployment (QFD) to resolve the tie of the dependent evaluation criteria. Alternative ratings and criteria weights of FMCDM were commonly presented by general (i.e., triangular or trapezoidal) fuzzy numbers. Recently, FMCDM with independent evaluation criteria under an interval-valued fuzzy environment was proposed; however, FMCDM with dependent evaluation criteria under the environment has scarcely been mentioned for high computation difficulty. Moreover, QFD has been generalized under a general fuzzy environment but not an interval-valued fuzzy environment. However, interval-valued fuzzy numbers can present more messages than triangular or trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Additionally, the assessment of airline service performance using several criteria is not only an FMCDM problem but also a problem with dependent evaluation criteria. In this paper, we generalize QFD and SAW under an interval-valued fuzzy environment for the assessment of airline service performance with dependent evaluation criteria for obtaining more messages. By the association of QFD and SAW, the computation tie of the dependent evaluation criteria corresponding to the interval-valued fuzzy numbers is resolved and more messages are gained for FMCDM.