Decision Making Model and Method Based on Distance Measure Between Interval Numbers in Railway Location

In order to solve the problem that quantitative and qualitative indexes are difficult to be unified into comprehensive fuzzy assessment of railway location selection, the theory of interval numbers is introduced to build a fuzzy optimal selection model based on distance measure between interval numbers. First, the quantitative and qualitative indexes in railway location schemes are transformed into interval numbers to obtain an interval number decision matrix, which is then normalized into a normalized interval number decision matrix. Second, weights of evaluation indexes are calculated by the distance measure between interval numbers and a weighted normalization decision matrix is obtained. On the basis of the weighted normalization decision matrix, the railway location schemes are ranked by the distance measure between interval numbers and the optimal scheme is selected. Finally, an engineering example of railway location selection was used to illustrate the operation procedure. The results prove that compared with the traditional analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method, this model can reduce the influence of subjective reasons on decision results in quantifying qualitative indexes with uncertainty; especially, the calculation results of index weights are more reliable. In addition, the proposed method is more convenient than the traditional projection method for priority ranking of alternative solutions.