Multi-attribute decision making method for product design schemes based on linguistic Z-numbers

In the intelligent manufacturing environment, the requirements for products are increasing day by day. Effective decision-making and management of product design schemes can shorten the design cycle and improve product quality. Although many studies use quantitative language for the evaluation of design scheme decision-making, there are few studies considering the degree of decision-maker’s evaluation confidence. A multi-attribute decision-making method of product design scheme based on linguistic Z-numhers (LZNs) is proposed to solve this problem. Firstly, according to the evaluation index, the linguistic term set of scheme evaluation and the evaluation confidence term set of decision-maker are established. Then, the decision matrix of LZNs is constructed and transformed into linguistic value. After that, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) under the LZNs environment is utilized to evaluate the product design schemes to obtain the ranking of the scheme and then obtain the optimal scheme. Finally, an example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that self-confidence can achieve a more reasonable and practical evaluation of the product design scheme, and it is easier to obtain the best scheme.