A novel type of soft rough covering and its application to multicriteria group decision making

In this paper, we contribute to a recent and successful modelization of uncertainty, which the practitioner often encounters in the formulation of multicriteria group decision making problems. To be precise, in order to approach the uncertainty issue we introduce a novel type of soft rough covering by means of soft neighborhoods, and then we use it to improve decision making in a multicriteria group environment. Our research method is as follows. Firstly we introduce the soft covering upper and lower approximation operators of soft rough coverings. Then its relationships with well-established types of soft rough coverings are analyzed. Secondly, we define and investigate the measure degree of our novel soft rough covering. With this tool we produce a new class of soft rough sets. Finally, we propose an application of such soft rough covering model to multicriteria group decision making by means of an algorithmic solution. A fully developed example supports the implementability of this decision making method.