Solving nuclear safeguards evaluation problem with fuzzy multiple attribute decision making methods

Abstract

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conducts nuclear safeguards evaluation (NSE) to verify that a State is living up to its international undertakings not to use nuclear programs for nuclear weapons purposes. In NSE, IAEA experts linguistically evaluate more than 900 indicators by benefitting from several sources such as State declarations, on-site inspections, the IAEA databases, and other open sources. The main problem encountered in NSE is on the aggregation of multiple experts' evaluations for numerous indicators to make the final decision about a State. Fuzzy multiple attribute decision making (FMADM) methods are capable of dealing such a problem. In this study, we investigate the applicability of four different FMADM methods to the NSE problem. For this purpose, a simple additive weighting method, a TOPSIS approach, a linguistic term-based method, and an operator-based method are applied to an example from the literature.