Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) has been prevailing in multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problems. Meanwhile, the fuzzy sets family has shown great power in representing vagueness and advancing the decision quality under uncertainties. The literature well documented the foundation and advantages of their integration, such as Fuzzy AHP. However, under what conditions do such integrations surely perform better than AHP in the MCDM process is still unclear. In this paper, we pick intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) sets—one of the advanced and most prevailing members of the fuzzy sets family, and further investigate when and how to integrate IF and AHP (IF-AHP) to the best advantage. We illustrate the formulated quantitative differences between the weight of AHP and the normalized defuzzified weight of IF-AHP. We uncover the qualitative and quantitative differences between AHP and IF-AHP, and identify the conditions and strategies of using IF-AHP instead of AHP. We use data experiments to illustrate our findings and further implement two case studies based on the real scenarios of supplier selection for validation and explanation.

层次分析法 (AHP) 在多准则决策 (MCDM) 问题中占主导地位。同时，模糊集族在表示模糊性和提高不确定性下的决策质量方面表现出强大的力量。文献很好地记录了它们集成的基础和优势，例如模糊层次分析法。然而，在什么条件下，这种集成在 MCDM 过程中肯定会比 AHP 表现得更好，目前还不清楚。在本文中，我们选择了直觉模糊 (IF) 集——模糊集家族中最先进和最流行的成员之一，并进一步研究了何时以及如何将 IF 和 AHP (IF-AHP) 整合到最佳优势。我们说明了 AHP 的权重与 IF-AHP 的归一化去模糊化权重之间的公式化定量差异。我们揭示了层次分析法和 IF-AHP 之间的定性和定量差异，并确定了使用 IF-AHP 代替 AHP 的条件和策略。我们使用数据实验来说明我们的发现，并基于供应商选择的真实场景进一步实施两个案例研究以进行验证和解释。