The interval-valued trapezoidal approximation of interval-valued fuzzy numbers and its application in fuzzy risk analysis

Taking into account that interval-valued fuzzy numbers can provide more flexibility to represent the imprecise information and interval-valued trapezoidal fuzzy numbers are widely used in practice,this paper devotes to seek an approximation operator that produces an interval-valued trapezoidal fuzzy number which is the nearest one to the given interval-valued fuzzy number,and the approximation operator preserves the core of the original interval-valued fuzzy number with respect to the weighted distance. as an application,we use the interval-valued trapezoidal approximation to handle fuzzy risk analysis problems,which overcome the drawback of existing fuzzy risk analysis methods. copyright © 2014 z. gong and s. hai.