Bipolar-valued hesitant fuzzy graph and its application

Abstract

In the real-world scenario, one has to find a dominating person in a social network, conferences, meetings or any group discussion. The fuzzy graph (network) is one of the most powerful tools to find the strongest influential person in a network. This paper aims to develop a concept of fuzzy graphs (FGs) in the setup of bipolar-valued hesitant fuzzy sets (BVHFs). The concept of bipolar-valued hesitant fuzzy graph (BVHFG) is different from the concept of bipolar fuzzy graph (BFG). BVHFG is the generalization of hesitant fuzzy graph (HFG), which not only considers the satisfaction degree of units in a network but also considers the satisfaction degree to some implicit counter property of units with several bipolar fuzzy values. We first introduce the definition of BVHFG, represented by another class of imprecise membership grades that refers to BVHF membership grades. We shall subsequently see the scope of BVHF membership grades in BVHFG is greater than the scope of bipolar-valued membership grades in BFG. In addition, we also discuss the basic operations and functional properties of BVHFGs. Finally, we propose a numerical method to find the most dominating person using our proposed work. As the proposed method of ranking considers the degree of hesitation as well as bipolarity, this method has the edge over earlier work. To establish the importance of our method, we also find domination degrees for HFG and BVHFG using the same example and show that there is a significant change in the ranking of dominating persons.