Application of the Spherical Fuzzy DEMATEL Model for Assessing the Drone Apps Issues

Abstract

During the past few years, the number of drones (unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs) manufactured and purchased has risen dramatically. It is predicted that it will continue to spread, making its use inevitable in all walks of life. Drone apps are therefore expected to overrun the app stores in the near future. The UAV's software is not being studied/researched despite several active research and studies being carried out in the UAV's hardware field. A large-scale empirical analysis of Google Play Store Platform apps connected to drones is being done in this direction. There are, however, a number of challenges with drone apps because of the lack of formal and specialised app development procedures. In this paper, eleven drone app issues have been identified. Then we applied the DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) method to analyse the drone app issues (DIs) and divide these issues into cause and effect groups. First, multiple experts assess the direct relationships between influential issues in drone apps. The evaluation results are presented in spherical fuzzy numbers (SFN). Secondly, convert the linguistic terms into SFN. Thirdly, based on DEMATEL, the cause-effect classifications of issues are obtained. Finally, the issues in the cause category are identified as DI’s in drone apps. The outcome of the research is compared with the other variants of DEMATEL like rough‐Z‐number‐based DEMATEL and spherical fuzzy number, and the comparative results suggest that Spherical Fuzzy-DEMATEL is the most fitting method to analyse the interrelationship of different issues in drone apps. The outcome of this work definitely assists the software industry in the successful identification of the critical issues where professionals and project managers could really focus.