An Application of Neutrosophic Sets to Decision Making

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neutrosophic set-based decision making method that improves upon previous soft set approaches by handling uncertainty and doubt in parameter characterizations, demonstrated through a soccer player selection example.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel neutrosophic decision making approach that effectively manages uncertainty in fuzzy and qualitative parameters, enhancing previous soft set methods.

Findings

The neutrosophic method provides more reliable decision outcomes.

Application to soccer player selection illustrates practical effectiveness.

Outperforms traditional binary and fuzzy decision approaches.

Abstract

Maji et al. introduced in 2002 a method of parametric decision making using soft sets as tools and representing their tabular form as a binary matrix. In cases, however, where some or all of the parameters used for the characterization of the elements of the universal set are of fuzzy texture, their method does not give always the best decision making solution. In order to tackle this problem, we modified in earlier works the method of Maji et al. by replacing the binary elements in the tabular form of the corresponding soft set either by grey numbers or by triangular fuzzy numbers. In this work, in order to tackle more efficiently cases in which the decision maker has doubts about the correctness of the fuzzy/qualitative characterizations assigned to some or all of the elements of the universal set, we replace the binary elements of the tabular form by neutrosophic triplets. Our new, neutrosophic decision making method is illustrated by an application concerning the choice of a new player by a soccer club.