Developments and Applications of Neutrosophic Theory in Civil Engineering Fields:A Review

Neutrosophic theory can effectively and reasonably express indeterminate,inconsistent,and incomplete information.Since Smarandache proposed the neutrosophic theory in 1998,neutrosophic theory and related research have been developed and applied to many important fields.Indeterminacy and fuzziness are one of the main research issues in the field of civil engineering.Therefore,the neutrosophic theory is very suitable for modeling and applications of civil engineering fields.This review paper mainly describes the recent developments and applications of neutrosophic theory in four important research areas of civil engineering:the neutrosophic decision-making theory and applied methods,the neutrosophic evaluation methods and applications of slope stability,the neutrosophic expressions and analyses of rock joint roughness coefficient,and the neutrosophic structural optimization methods and applications.In terms of these research achievements in the four areas of civil engineering,the neutrosophic theory demonstrates its advantages in dealing with the indeterminate and inconsistent issues in civil engineering and the effectiveness and practicability of existing applied methods.In the future work,the existing research results will be further improved and extended in civil engineering problems.In addition,the neutrosophic theory will also have better application prospects in other fields of civil engineering.

Network Analysis for Projects with High Risk Levels in Uncertain Environments

The critical path method is one of the oldest and most important techniques used for planning and scheduling projects.The main objective of project management science is to determine the critical path through a network representation of projects.The critical path through a network can be determined by many algorithms and is useful for managing,monitoring,and controlling the time and cost of an entire project.The essential problem in this case is that activity durations are uncertain;time presents considerable uncertainty because the time of an activity is not always easily or accurately estimated.This issue increases the need to use neutrosophic theory to solve the critical path problem.Real-world problems are characterized by a lack of precision,consistency,and completeness.The concept of neutrosophic sets has been introduced as a generalization of fuzzy,intuitionistic fuzzy,and crisp sets to overcome the ambiguity surrounding real-world problems.Truth-,falsity-,and indeterminacy-membership functions are used to express neutrosophic elements.This study was performed to examine a neutrosophic event-oriented algorithm for determining the critical path in activity-on-arc networks.The activity time estimates are presented as trapezoidal neutrosophic numbers,and score and accuracy functions are used to obtain a crisp model of the problem.An appropriate numerical example is then used to explain the proposed method.