An Improved Model of Variable Fuzzy Sets with Normal Membership Function for Crane Safety Evaluation.

Crane safety evaluation is significant for reducing the casualties and economic losses. Various evaluation methods have been applied to evaluate crane safety. However, when index standard with respect to every level is described in terms of intervals, existing crane safety evaluation models are not ideal. Although variable fuzzy sets (VFS) method has successfully solved similar problems, its evaluation processes are rather complex complicated and tedious. In this paper, we provided an improved VFS evaluation method with normal membership function for solving crane safety problem, in which the evaluation criteria are described in terms of intervals. To demonstrate our presented method, the improved variable fuzzy sets (IVFS) method was applied to two numerical cases including an application to crane safety assessment. It is shown that our proposed method possesses the merit to simplify assessment processes of traditional VFS and can be applied to assess crane safety when criteria values are defined as interval numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]