Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy risk estimation of the ship system failures based on the expert judgments

Abstract

In the safety engineering, risk estimation is in practice confronted with difficulties connected with shortage of data. In such cases, we have to rely on subjective estimations made by persons with practical knowledge in the field of interest, i.e. experts. However, in some realistic situations, the decision makers might be reluctant or unable to assign the crisp values to the evaluation judgments due to his/her limited knowledge. In other words, there is a certain degree of hesitancy in human cognition and his/her judgment. The probabilistic approach turns out to be insufficient in modeling the subjective uncertainty. Taking advantages of the Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets in dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty into account, they can be used to handle with the subjective evaluations of experts, who may have insufficient knowledge of the problem domain or uncertainty in assigning the evaluation values to the objects considered. This paper addresses the Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy methods in the risk estimation of the ship system failures based on the expert judgments.