Evaluation of research proposals for grant funding using interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that the most appealing external funding for a project is grant funding. Therefore, evaluation of research proposal task needs an elaborate approach so as not to finance inconvenient projects. It is indispensable to establish a detailed study for submitted research proposals to have a clearer picture of the grant funding candidates. This study has contributed to research proposal evaluation using a multicriteria approach based on interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets. An interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy preference relation matrix is initially constructed to determine the relative importance of criteria based on pairwise comparisons in the presence of insufficient information about the criteria. The proposed evaluation method for grand funding allocation problem is composed of six main criteria and 24 sub-criteria. A sensitivity analysis is applied to see the robustness of the decision made.