Copyright © 2012 Ming Li. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Axiomatic design (AD) provides a framework to describe design objects and a set of axioms to evaluate relations between intended functions and means by which they are achieved. It has been extended to evaluate alternatives in engineering under fuzzy environment. With respect to multiple criteria group decision making (MCDM) with incomplete weight information under fuzzy linguistic environment, a new method is proposed. In the method, the fuzzy axiomatic design based on triangle representation model is used to aggregate the linguistic evaluating information. In order to get the weight vector of the criteria, we establish a nonlinear optimization model based on the basic ideal of fuzzy axiomatic design (FAD), by which the criteria weights can be determined. It is based on the concept that the optimal alternative should have the least weighted information content. Then, the weighted information content is derived by summing weighted information content for each criterion. The alternative that has the least total weighted information content is the best. Finally, a numerical example is used to illustrate the availability of the proposed method.