Which operation moves the ranking? Single-operation contrasts for a neutrosophic TOPSIS model with ordered weighted distances
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22712873Keywords:
TOPSIS, ordered weighted averaging, single-valued neutrosophic linguistic numbers, ablation analysis, robustness, group decision makingAbstract
A neutrosophic TOPSIS model with ordered weighted distances combines several operations, and single-operation contrasts, which change one operation while all others stay fixed, show what each contributes, including the indeterminacy coordinate that distinguishes the model from classical TOPSIS. I apply such contrasts to the model I used in 2025 to rank four areas of a consulting firm, and to simulated decisions. On the published case the ranking is robust: 60 of 72 pipelines in a factorial of operations give the published ranking, the other 12 being random permutations of indeterminacy degrees across areas; the top area keeps first place under every weight, OWA and structural change examined, and changes in at most 5.85% of random rating perturbations under the published pipeline, against 15.68% under classical TOPSIS. Agreement among the three managers, measured on their individual ratings, is high. In 288 simulated conditions (4000 replicates each), at the published orness, deleting the indeterminacy coordinate changes the choice in 11.4% to 21.3% of replicates, as often as vector normalisation (14.6% to 21.4%) or replacing the ordered combination by a global distance (20.7% to 28.4%). Keeping the coordinate lowers regret by 0.22, 1.18 and 0.05 points when hesitation is linked to performance, risk or reliability, and raises it by 0.16 points when hesitation is uninformative. Applications should report single-operation contrasts and state what hesitation means.
Received: 3 August 2026 | Accepted: 12 September 2026
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Copyright (c) 2026 Vladimir Vega Falcón
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