Based on neutrosophic fuzzy environment: a new development of FWZIC and FDOSM for benchmarking smart e-tourism applications

Abstract

The task of benchmarking smart e-tourism applications based on multiple smart key concept attributes is considered a multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problem. Although the literature review has evaluated and benchmarked these applications, data ambiguity and vagueness continue to be unresolved issues. The robustness of the fuzzy decision by opinion score method (FDOSM) and fuzzy weighted with zero inconsistency (FWZIC) is proven compared with that of other MADM methods. Thus, this study extends FDOSM and FWZIC under a new fuzzy environment to address the mentioned issues whilst benchmarking the applications. The neutrosophic fuzzy set is used for this purpose because of its high ability to handle ambiguous and vague information comprehensively. Fundamentally, the proposed methodology comprises two phases. The first phase adopts and describes the decision matrices of the smart e-tourism applications. The second phase presents the proposed framework in two sections. In the first section, the weight of each attribute of smart e-tourism applications is calculated through the neutrosophic FWZIC (NS-FWZIC) method. The second section employs the weights determined by the NS-FWZIC method to benchmark all the applications per each category (tourism marketing and smart-based tourism recommendation system categories) through the neutrosophic FDOSM (NS-FDOSM). Findings reveal that: (1) the NS-FWZIC method effectively weights the applications’ attributes. Real time receives the highest importance weight (0.402), whereas augmented reality has the lowest weight (0.005). The remaining attributes are distributed in between. (2) In the context of group decision-making, NS-FDOSM is used to uniform the variation found in the individual benchmarking results of the applications across all categories. Systematic ranking, sensitivity analysis and comparison analysis assessments are used to evaluate the robustness of the proposed work. Finally, the limitations of this study are discussed along with several future directions.