A Neutrosophic Number based Multi-Choice Best-Worst Multi-criteria Decision-Making Approach and its Applications

Abstract

The best-worst method (BWM) is an advantageous mathematical method for solving the problem of prioritization in real-life decision-making problems. It helps to provide consensus decision-making by minimizing inconsistency and weighing the factors. BWM takes pairwise comparisons as input parameters. To address such issues where multiple options are assigned by experts to pairwise comparisons, Multi-choice BWM was developed. This method has shown its application in handling various choices and choosing that choice for which inconsistency is minimized. In this work, we have incorporated neutrosophic fuzziness in multiple options of pairwise comparisons in the form of triangular neutrosophic numbers. Neutrosophic numbers provide us with membership, non-membership, and indeterminacy grades, which incorporate more information to handle uncertainty in real-life decision problems. We have proposed a mathematical framework to accommodate neutrosophic fuzzy theory, multiple choices, and best-worst method approaches for solving multi-criteria decision-making problems. To show the applicability of the proposed model and validate our study, the method has been experimented with three case studies. The results obtained are compared with previously proposed models. It shows that similar ranking orders are obtained using the proposed approach.