Bipolar neutrosophic DEMATEL for urban sustainable development

Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in integrating the neutrosophic sets with multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods. Previous literature have suggested the integration of neutrosophic set with the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method, in which the three memberships of neutrosophic set are utilized to solve problems that are characterized by non-deterministic information. Differently from the neutrosophic DEMATEL, which directly used three independent memberships, this paper proposes bipolar neutrosophic DEMATEL (Bipolar NS-DEMATEL) of which the positive and negative of truth, indeterminate and false memberships of bipolar neutrosophic set are introduced to enhance decision in urban sustainable development. Three criteria and fifteen sub-criteria of urban sustainable development are the main MCDM structures that need to be solved using the proposed method. A group of experts were invited to provide rating of performance values of sub-criteria of urban sustainable development problem using a bipolar neutrosophic linguistic scale. The proposed Bipolar NS-DEMATEL is applied to segregate the sub-criteria of urban sustainable development into cause and effect groups. In addition, the network relation map is drawn to observe the interaction among the sub-criteria. The Bipolar NS-DEMATEL suggests that air quality (SC12) is the most important sub-criteria in managing urban sustainable development. The result also unveils that the sub-criterion safety (SC21) is impacted and influenced by other sub-criteria. The identification of sub-criteria in accordance with their net causer and net receiver would help the authority in prioritizing sub-criteria that may directly be affected by urban development.