Fermatean fuzzy Heronian mean operators and MEREC-based additive ratio assessment method: An application to food waste treatment technology selection

Uncertainty is often occurred in real-life decision-making problems due to the lack of complete information, imprecise data, and the vagueness of decision making experts in qualitative judgment, thus, the crisp values of criteria may be insufficient to handle such types of complex real situations. As the extension of fuzzy set, intuitionistic fuzzy set and Pythagorean fuzzy set, the Fermatean Fuzzy Set (FFS) has been demonstrated as a powerful tool to handle the uncertainty arisen in practical decision-making problems. Thus, this study aims to introduce an integrated Fermatean fuzzy information-based decision-making method by combining method based on the removal effects of criteria (MEREC) and additive ratio assessment (ARAS) methods with the application in a food waste treatment technology selection problem. By using Fermatean fuzzy numbers, the suggested approach successfully handle the qualitative data and uncertain information that often occur in practical situations. This study consists of four phases. First, entropy measure is developed for FFS and further utilized for determining the experts’ weights. Second, some Fermatean fuzzy Heronian mean operators and their properties are introduced to aggregate the Fermatean fuzzy information. These operators can provide us a valuable means to handle practical multicriteria decision-making problems on FFSs context. Third, an extended MEREC technique is originated to assess objective criteria weights within FFS context. Fourth, an integrated ARAS method is introduced with the combination of proposed entropy measure, generalized weighted Fermatean fuzzy Heronian mean operator and MEREC technique to evaluate and rank the alternatives. To confirm the reasonableness and practicality of the proposed methodology, an empirical case study of food waste treatment technology selection is discussed on FFSs settings. Further, a comparison with extant models and a sensitivity investigation are performed to confirm the validity and robustness of the obtained outcomes.