An Integrated Decision-Making Method Based on Neutrosophic Numbers for Investigating Factors of Coastal Erosion

The recent boom of various integrated decision-making methods has attracted many researchers to the field. The recent integrated Analytic Network Process and Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (ANP–DEMATEL) methods were developed based on crisp numbers and fuzzy numbers. However, these numbers are incapable of dealing with the indeterminant and inconsistent information that exists in real-life problems. This paper proposes improvements to the integrated ANP–DEMATEL method by bringing together the neutrosophic numbers, the ANP method, and the DEMATEL method, which are later abbreviated to NS-DANP. The proposed NS-DANP method can handle the indeterminacy elements in the decision-making environment, as the single-valued neutrosophic numbers are used in the decision analysis. This proposed NS-DANP modification method includes linguistic variables representing the single-valued neutrosophic numbers (SVNNs), and also introduces the single-valued neutrosophic weighted averaging (SVNWA) aggregation operator to aggregate the decision makers’ judgments instead of the typical averaging method.