Linking Neutrosophic AHP and Neutrosophic Social Choice Theory for Group Decision Making

Abstract

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a decision-making technique that has been widely studied and developed by the scientific community. The interest in this tool is because it combines scientific rigor with the simplicity of its application. Additionally, it has been extended to uncertainty frameworks, such as fuzzy and neutrosophic frameworks. This paper aims to define a new method called NAHP+NSC, where the Neutrosophic Analytic Hierarchy Process (NAHP) is combined with the recently introduced Neutrosophic Social Choice (NSC) theory. Neutrosophy incorporates indeterminacy to both the AHP technique and the SC theory, which is an intrinsic condition of any decision-making process. On the other hand, it is possible to count on a group of experts to carry out the NAHP evaluations, where the chosen alternative is the one with the highest votes. Experts are divided into kind of homogeneous sub-groups called Interest Groups (IG), where each IG conjointly evaluates the proposed alternatives, and then tools of NSC are used for choosing the best alternative. The contribution of this new method is that evaluations and results are more accurate when indeterminacy is incorporated.