Hausdorff Distance and Similarity Measures for Single-Valued Neutrosophic Sets with Application in Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Abstract

Hausdorff distance is one of the important distance measures to study the degree of dissimilarity between two sets that had been used in various fields under fuzzy environments. Among those, the framework of single-valued neutrosophic sets (SVNSs) is the one that has more potential to explain uncertain, inconsistent and indeterminate information in a comprehensive way. And so, Hausdorff distance for SVNSs is important. Thus, we propose two novel schemes to calculate the Hausdorff distance and its corresponding similarity measures (SMs) for SVNSs. In doing so, we firstly develop the two forms of Hausdorff distance between SVNSs based on the definition of Hausdorff metric between two sets. We then use these new distance measures to construct several SMs for SVNSs. Some mathematical theorems regarding the proposed Hausdorff distances for SVNSs are also proven to strengthen its theoretical properties. In order to show the exact calculation behavior and distance measurement mechanism of our proposed methods in accordance with the decorum of Hausdorff metric, we utilize an intuitive numerical example that demonstrate the novelty and practicality of our proposed measures. Furthermore, we develop a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method under single-valued neutrosophic environment using the proposed SMs based on our defined Hausdorff distance measures, called as a single-valued neutrosophic MCDM (SVN-MCDM) method. In this connection, we employ our proposed SMs to compute the degree of similarity of each option with the ideal choice to identify the best alternative as well as to perform an overall ranking of the alternatives under study. We then apply our proposed SVN-MCDM scheme to solve two real world problems of MCDM under single-valued neutrosophic environment to show its effectiveness and application.