It is well known that there are some unfavorable shortcomings in the ordinary operational rules (OORs) of intuitionistic fuzzy number (IFN), and there exists a close and forceful connection between the intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) and Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST). We can utilize this relationship to present a transparent and fruitful semantic framework for IFS in terms of DST. In the framework of DST, an IFN can be converted into a basic probability assignment (BPA) and operations on IFNs can be represented as operations on a belief interval (BI), which can break away from the revealed shortcomings of the OORs of the IFN. Although there are many operators to aggregate the IFN, the operator to aggregate the BPA is rare. The Maclaurin symmetric mean (MSM) operator has the advantage of considering interrelationships among any number of attributes. The power average (PA) operator can reduce the influences of extreme evaluation values. In addition, for measuring the difference between IFNs, we replace the Hamming distance and Euclidean distance with the Jousselme distance (JD). In this paper, we develop an intuitionistic fuzzy power MSM (IFPMSMDST) operator and an intuitionistic fuzzy weighted power MSM (IFPWMSMDST) operator in the framework of the DST and provide their favorable properties. Then, we propose a novel method based on the proposed operators to solve multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems without intermediate defuzzification when their attributes and weights are both IFNs. Finally, some examples are utilized to demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the previous ones.
Multi-Attribute Decision Making Based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Power Maclaurin Symmetric Mean Operators in the Framework of Dempster-Shafer Theory