A decision-making framework for China’s rare earth industry security evaluation by neutrosophic soft CoCoSo method

Abstract

The rare earth industry is a crucial strategic industry that is related to the national economy and national security. In the context of economic globalization, international competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and the rare earth industry is facing a more severe survival and development environment than ever before. Although China is the greatest world’s rare earth country in rare earth reserves, production, consumption and export volume, it is not a rare earth power. The rare earth industry has no right to speak in the international market. The comparative advantage is weakening and the security of rare earth industry appears. Therefore, studying the rare earth industry security has important theoretical and practical significance. When measuring the China’s rare earth industry security, the primary problem involves tremendous uncertainty. Neutrosophic soft set (NSS), depicted by the parameterized form of truth membership, falsity membership and indeterminacy membership, is a more serviceable pattern for capturing uncertainty. In this paper, five dimensions of rare earth industry security are identified and then prioritized against twelve different criteria relevant to structure, organization, layout, policy and ecological aspects of industry security. Then, the objective weight is computed by CRITIC (Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation) method while the integrated weight is determined by concurrently revealing subjective weight and objective weight. Later, neutrosophic soft decision making method based CoCoSo (Combined Compromise Solution) is explored for settling the issue of low discrimination. Lastly, the feasibility and validity of the developed algorithm is verified by the issue of China’s rare earth industry security evaluation.