An Advanced Approach to Fuzzy Soft Group Decision-Making Using Weighted Average Ratings

Group decision-making methods (GDMMs) based on fuzzy soft sets (FSSs) have recently received a lot of attention. Mohammed and Azam (Yugosl J Oper Res 30: 59–70, 2020) suggested a novel method to FSS-based group decision-making by introducing new concepts of standard priority table (SPT) and absolute score, with the purpose of employing FSSs more effectively for uncertainty issues that are common in most real-world situations. Although Mohammed-Azam GDMM is quite effective at solving FSS-based group decision-making problems (GDMPs), it does have certain drawbacks. We have shown with an example in this paper that the Mohammed-Azam GDMM is insufficient to solve FSS-based GDMPs. As a result, in this study, we offer a modified adjustable GDMM to solve FSS-based GDMPs by introducing weighted average ratings instead of absolute scores, which is more stable and more feasible than the Mohammed and Azam GDMM. The initial innovation of our proposed GDMM is the concept of weighted average ratings rather than absolute scores. The second uniqueness is that our GDMM can be adjusted, whereas the Mohammed-Azam approach cannot. Moreover, Mohammed-Azam GDMM used FSSs evaluated by only three DMs, but the constructed method in this paper, any finite number of DMs can participate in GDMPs. The fourth difference is that we solve a real-life GDMP using our suggested GDMM, which is impossible to solve using the Mohammed-Azam method. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.