A mcdm method with linguistic variables and intuitionistic fuzzy numbers to evaluate product development projects

Abstract

The high-tech consumer goods market is a rapidly changing environment. Project evaluation and selection play important roles in an organization to increase its competitive advantages successfully. When handling new product project decision problems, it is important to collect information to make the right decision at the initial stage of product development. Past research found that managers usually only evaluate product development projects (PDP) based on a company’s own resources. However, competitors can generate similar products to compete in the market. In this way, the process of PDP evaluation and selection should consider internal and external factors. In other words, it is a multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In addition, uncertainty and complex project evaluations are usually involved in dealing with MCDM problems. Therefore, we propose a new MCDM method by combining linguistic variables with intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IFNs) to analyze the performance of PDPs. The proposed method is then implemented to evaluate a new kind of smartphone in order to fit with 5th generation mobile networks (5G). Finally, the conclusions and future research direction are discussed.