An integrating spherical fuzzy AHP and axiomatic design approach and its application in human–machine interface design evaluation

Abstract

Human–machine interface (HMI) design evaluation is critical in interactive product development because it directly affects the cost of subsequent design and user experiments. The evaluation information of HMI design mainly depends on the subjective perception and preference of experts, especially the hesitancy degree is rarely considered. We propose an integrated spherical fuzzy AHP (SF-AHP) and spherical fuzzy axiomatic design (SF-AD) method to choose a reasonable HMI alternative, considering the potential risks caused by the hesitancy degree of experts. Firstly, we introduce a process of automatically repairing inconsistent spherical fuzzy preference relations (SFPR) for SF-AHP. After that, we build suitable evaluation criteria and calculate the criteria weight by the SF-AHP method. We further extend the axiomatic design to the spherical fuzzy environment and propose a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method based on SF-AD to evaluate HMI alternatives. The case analysis results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the HMI design evaluation process, and the sensitivity and comparative analysis results indicate that the proposed method is stable and reliable.