Picture Fuzzy Benefit/Cost Analysis in Digital Transformation for an IT Firm

ABSTRACT

With the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, it has been seen that the importance of IT companies and digitalization investments has accelerated. Engineering economics techniques are frequently used in investments and provide use among alternatives. Although benefit/cost analysis is one of the important engineering economic techniques, it is seen that it is widely used in the literature. Engineering economics analyzes are made based on the opinions and experiences of experts. While human thoughts can contain uncertainty, these uncertainties should also be taken into account in the investment evaluation. Fuzzy sets come to the fore in the literature to eliminate the uncertainty in human opinions. Fuzzy sets represent human thoughts through membership functions. Since fuzzy sets were proposed in 1965, fuzzy sets have extended to their extensions. Some of these extensions are type 2 fuzzy sets, spherical fuzzy sets, hesitant fuzzy sets, q-rung fuzzy sets, picture fuzzy sets, Pythagorean fuzzy sets, fermatean fuzzy sets, circular intuitionistic fuzzy sets, decomposed fuzzy sets and etc. When the studies on the benefit/cost analysis method, which is one of the engineering economics approaches, are examined, it is seen that it is used with fuzzy sets and their extensions. In this study, benefit/cost analysis is extended with picture fuzzy sets, and the extended model is applied in the digital transformation investment assessment for an information technology. Future suggestions and recommendations are given in conclusion section. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.