Nidhi Kadam
Decision Sciences Area, Indian Institute of Management Lucknow, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Garima Mittal
Decision Sciences Area, Indian Institute of Management Lucknow, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.

DOI https://doi.org/10.33889/IJMEMS.2026.11.4.061

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Abstract

Most Information Technology (IT) organizations periodically review their products and services to aid systematic decision-making. Such decisions must balance budgetary and non-budgetary constraints to allocate resources effectively in the short and long term. While new IT products offer limited quantitative data, ongoing offerings yield substantial performance related information, which is used in this study to develop a framework for assessing existing Open-Source Software (OSS) products. As such data is dynamic and uncertain, we employ Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Parameterized Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Soft Sets (IVIFP-IVIFSS or d-sets) to model dual uncertainty and propose a maintenance-oriented decision-support framework. The study assesses OSS products under two complementary decision-making contexts: (i) unified long-term product ranking using d-sets and (ii) temporal short-term consensus ranking using d-sets and Borda aggregation. While the former context captures persistent maintenance-performance signals, the latter reveals localized operational dynamics relevant for interim decision-making. The study illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed ranking methodology through a case study using data from 16 OSS products in the Bugzilla repository, evaluated using four parameters. The framework is methodologically complex, but the resulting rankings are intuitive and actionable. In addition, a perturbation analysis was conducted with the Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Parameters (IVIFP) varied by ±5%, ±10% and ±15% to assess the robustness of the resulting d-set rankings. The results show that the proposed framework produces stable and interpretable rankings under dynamic and uncertain conditions. These findings indicate that d-sets are useful for uncertainty-aware performance evaluation and portfolio-level decision-making for IT products and services.

Keywords- Interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy parameterized interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy soft sets, d-sets, Open-source software, Performance evaluation, IT product ranking, Multi-criteria decision-making.

Citation

Kadam, N., & Mittal, G. (2026). A Multi-Criteria Framework for Software Product Evaluation and Ranking Using Fuzzy d-Sets. International Journal of Mathematical, Engineering and Management Sciences, 11(4), 1487-1511. https://doi.org/10.33889/IJMEMS.2026.11.4.061.