A soft set approach to relations and its application to decision making

Abstract

One of the most useful mathematical tools for examining the relationships among objects is the concept of relations. Besides, it can also be necessary to throw light on uncertainties in these relationships. Soft set theory, in which different approaches used in defining the notions bring about different applications in many areas, enables to overcome uncertainties. The purpose of this paper is to define soft relations in a different way and to give a decision making method using the concept of soft relations. For this purpose, firstly, the soft relations are defined on the collection of soft elements, unlike the previous ones. After their basic properties are provided, the correspondence between the soft relations and the classical relations is investigated and some examples are given. Finally, an algorithm is proposed using the soft relations for solving decision making problems, where the decision is related to other circumstances, and given an illustrative example.