A novel approach integrating AHP and TOPSIS under spherical fuzzy sets for advanced manufacturing system selection

Abstract

The hybrid of AHP and TOPSIS has led researchers to integrate the combination with different extensions of fuzzy sets. The recently developed three-dimensional spherical fuzzy set is an extension of the fuzzy set, which is effective in handling uncertainty and quantifying expert judgements. In this paper, a novel framework is elaborated which combines AHP and TOPSIS with a spherical fuzzy set. Spherical fuzzy AHP is used to calculate the spherical fuzzy weights of the criteria, while spherical fuzzy TOPSIS is used to find the final rank of the alternatives. A new spherical fuzzy geometric mean formula is proposed for calculating the spherical fuzzy criteria weights. A new eleven-point spherical fuzzy linguistic term scale is presented, which can be used by the experts to quantify the preference. The proposed framework is applied to an advanced manufacturing system selection problem with six evaluation criteria and four alternatives. It is found that spherical fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS is effective in handling uncertainty in decision making and leads to robust and competitive results compared with state-of-the-art multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches.