Defuzzify firstly or finally: Dose it matter in fuzzy DEMATEL under uncertain environment?

Abstract: Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method is widely used in many real applications. With the desirable property of efficient handling with the uncertain information in decision making, the fuzzy DEMATEL is heavily studied. Recently, Dytczak and Ginda suggested to defuzzify the fuzzy numbers firstly and then use the classical DEMATEL to obtain the final result. In this short paper, we show that it is not reasonable in some situations. The results of defuzzification at the first step are not coincide with the results of defuzzification at the final step.It seems that the alternative is to defuzzification in the final step in fuzzy DEMATEL.