A fuzzy computing approach to aggregate expert opinions using parabolic and exparabolic approximation procedures for solving multi-criteria group decision-making problems

Abstract

AbstractTriangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) are widely used for selection problems to determine expert opinions using linguistic expressions. Some aggregation procedures are developed to determine expert opinions more accurately. However, there is a need for a simple and more useful procedure to solve the selection problems more suitably. For this purpose, our study offers a triangular, exparabolic, and parabolic area calculation-based approximation approach for TFNs to aggregate the possible hedges (very and more or less) for TFNs. Hence, this aggregation procedure provides a tuning opportunity for classical TFN expressions to capture possible tuning processes to reflect the hesitancies of experts. The technique for order preferences by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is applied in the two studies from extant literature, and suitable alternatives are determined as a result of the ranking process. Finally, a comparative analysis is presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed procedure. The conventional TOPSIS model’s ranking scores are very close for exemplified examples (i.e., 0.5308, 0.4510, 0.4550 and 0.5304, 0.4626, 0.4940), but the proposed model’s result has fluctuated for the same examples (i.e., 0.346, 0,669, 0,567 and 0.208, 0.991, 0.148). So, the main advantage of the proposed aggregation procedure is the alternative ranking scores separation capability analyzed with their linguistic diversification.