A novel VIKOR method using spherical fuzzy sets and its application to warehouse site selection

Abstract

The extensions of ordinary fuzzy sets such as intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS), Pythagorean fuzzy sets (PFS), and neutrosophic sets (NS), whose membership functions are based on three dimensions, aim at collecting experts’ judgments more informatively and explicitly. In the literature, generalized three-dimensional spherical fuzzy sets have been developed by Kutlu Gündoğdu and Kahraman (2019), including their arithmetic operations, aggregation operators, and defuzzification operations. Spherical Fuzzy Sets (SFS) are a new extension of Intuitionistic, Pythagorean and Neutrosophic Fuzzy sets, a SFS is characterized by a membership degree, a nonmembership degree, and a hesitancy degree satisfying the condition that their squared sum is equal to or less than one. These sets provide a larger preference domain in 3D space for decision makers (DMs). In this paper, our aim is to extend classical VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method to spherical fuzzy VIKOR (SF-VIKOR) method and to show its applicability and validity through an illustrative example and to present a comparative analysis between spherical fuzzy TOPSIS (SF-TOPSIS) and SF-VIKOR. We handle a warehouse location selection problem with four alternatives and four criteria in order to demonstrate the performance of the proposed SF-VIKOR method.