Affiliations: [a] School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
| [b]
Shaanxi Province Key Laboratory of Flight Control and Simulation Technology, Xi’an, China
| [c] Guidance Department, Military Technical College, Cairo, Egypt
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. Qianlei Jia, Shaanxi Province Key Laboratory of Flight Control and Simulation Technology, Xi’an 710072, China. E-mail: jiaql@mail.nwpu.edu.cn.
Abstract: There is a growing body of literature that recognises the importance of Z-numbers proposed by Prof Zadeh. However, due to the complicated structure and short presentation time, many unknowns about Z-numbers still exist. To fill these gaps, this study aims to make use of rectangular coordinate system to express linguistic Z-numbers. Simultaneously, this study sets out to design a score function to quantify the information contained in different Z-numbers. Subsequently, distance measure and similarity measure are also presented from the perspective of coordinate system. Besides, linguistic discrete Z-numbers and belief rule base (BRB) model are combined to construct a novel reasoning model on the basis of implication operators. To verify the validity of the proposed method, three representative examples of epidemic level assessment, multicriteria group decision-making (MCGDM), and network security assessment are employed. The comparison with other widely used methods are performed to further demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
