Evaluating social sustainable development factors using multi-experts Z-fuzzy AHP

Abstract

This study presents a multi-experts multiple criteria decision making approach for quantitatively evaluating social sustainable development factors. The proposed model which integrates Z-fuzzy numbers and fuzzy AHP enables to weight and rank social sustainable development factors, which may give guidance to many sustainable development researches. In addition to the first usage of the Z-fuzzy numbers for the weighting decision of social sustainable development factors, another contribution of the study is presenting the Z-fuzzy numbers integrated AHP method with multi-experts which can be useful in many problems and applications containing uncertainty. The most important advantage of the Z-fuzzy numbers integrated AHP method is that it allows the degree of confidence of decision makers to be included to the calculations. An application of the proposed approach is also presented for prioritizing the social sustainable development factors based on the experts’ evaluations together with a sensitivity analysis.