Title: Software reliability allocation incorporating Pythagorean fuzzy theory and AHP

Authors: Neha; Vibha Verma; Abhishek Tandon; Anu G. Aggarwal

Addresses: Department of Operational Research, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, India ' Department of Operational Research, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, India ' Indian Council of Social Science and Research, Delhi-110067, India ' Department of Operational Research, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, India

Abstract: Systematic management in the early stage of development helps the software firms to develop a qualitative software product. One of the crucial tasks in the software design phase of software development life cycle is to assign reliabilities to modules based on the overall reliability goal. AHP has been extensively used to allocate reliability among modules on the basis of preferences given by the decision-maker, who can be an industry expert or senior level IT personnel. Their opinions are obtained in linguistic terms and later converted to crisp values for comparison at various levels. This approach incorporates vague decisions, incomplete information and uncertain preferences during decision-making. In this paper, we discuss an allocation method where preferences are assigned in terms of Pythagorean fuzzy numbers based on a hierarchy that relates the users, software engineers and programmer expectations for the software system. The methodology and concepts used have been discussed in detail. The proposed approach has been implemented through an example problem.

Keywords: software reliability allocation; hierarchical structure; multi-criteria decision making; MCDM; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; Pythagorean fuzzy sets; PFS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2021.115128

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2021 Vol.38 No.1, pp.19 - 34

Received: 01 Feb 2019
Accepted: 24 Jul 2019
Published online: 18 May 2021 *

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