Elicitation criterions for restricted intersection of two incomplete soft sets

Purpose: This paper aims to develop and compare several elicitation criterions for decision making of incomplete soft sets which are generated by restricted intersection. Design/methodology/approach: One time elicitation process is divided into two steps. Using the greedy idea four criterions for elicitation of objects are built based on maximax, maximin, minimax regret and combination of expected choice values and elicitation times. Then these initial unknown values which produce incomplete values together with known information are in priority. Findings: Fast methods for computing possibly and necessarily optimal solutions before or in the elicitation process are invented. As far as the sizes of soft sets used in the simulation experiments, it is found statistically that we should choose the criterion based on the combination of expected choice value and expected elicitation times in the first step of one time elicitation. Practical implications: The developed methods can be used for decision making of incomplete 0-1 information systems, which are generated by the conjunction of two experts' incomplete 0-1 evaluation results. Whenever the available information is not enough for choosing a necessarily optimal solution, the elicitation algorithms can help elicitate as few unknown values as possible until an optimal result is found. An elicitation system is made to show that our elicitation methods can potentially be embedded in recommender or decision support systems. Originality/value: The elicitation problems are proposed for decision making of operation-generated soft sets by extracting from some practical problems. The concept of expected elicitation times of objects is defined and used for developing one type of elicitation strategy. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.