Pythagorean fuzzy multiset and its application to course placements

The concept of fuzzy set theory is of paramount relevance to tackling the issues of uncertainties in real-life problems. In a quest to having a reasonable means of curbing imprecision, the idea of fuzzy sets had been generalized to intuitionistic fuzzy sets, fuzzy multisets, Pythagorean fuzzy sets among others. The notion of intuitionistic fuzzy multisets (IFMS) came into the limelight naturally because there are instances when repetitions of both membership and non-membership degrees cannot be ignored like in the treatment of patients, where each consultations are key in diagnosis and therapy. In IFMS theory, the sum of the degrees of membership and non-membership is less than or equals one at each levels. Supposing the sum of the degrees of membership and non-membership is greater than or equal to one at any level, then the concept of Pythagorean fuzzy multisets (PFMS) is appropriate to handling such scenario. In this paper, the idea of PFMS is proposed as an extensional Pythagorean fuzzy sets proposed by R. R. Yager. In fact, PFMS is a Pythagorean fuzzy set in the framework of multiset. The main objectives of this paper are to expatiate the operations under PFMSs and discuss some of their algebraic properties with some related results. The concepts of level sets, cuts, accuracy and score functions, and modal operators are established in the setting of PFMSs with a number of results. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed soft computing technique, a course placements scenario is discussed via PFMS framework using composite relation defined on PFMSs. This soft computing technique could find expression in other multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems.