Assessing farmers' perception to Agriculture 4.0 technologies: A new interval‐valued spherical fuzzy sets based approach

Agriculture 4.0 is the usage of advanced technologies for ensuring sustainability and efficient use of resources in agriculture, which can be accepted one of the biggest challenges of mankind. With Agriculture 4.0 technologies, it is aimed to raise productivity, reduce waste and costs. To ensure that agriculture 4.0 technologies are adopted by farmers as soon as possible, the perspective and perception of farmers to these technologies should be analyzed firstly. For this purpose, we propose a decision-making framework to measure farmers' view of Agriculture 4.0 technologies and to perform a prioritization study based on the perception of use among these technologies. Multicriteria decision analysis is also utilized to deal with all qualitative and quantitative factors in the decision process. Within the scope of this study, interval-valued spherical fuzzy numbers are used to model the vagueness in the process in the best manner and to be able to reflect the uncertainty arising from the usage of linguistic variables in the decision process. The SWARA and MAIRCA multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods, which have been used frequently in the literature and are applied very successfully in MCDM problems, have been firstly extended by spherical fuzzy sets (SFSs) and the advantages for these methods have been utilized within the framework of fuzzy logic. The proposed method allows decision-makers to mirror their hesitations in decision-making using a linguistic evaluation scale established upon interval-valued SFSs. A comparative analysis based on the ordinary fuzzy sets is also performed for the obtained results and the clear superiority of the proposed approach is presented. In addition, the robustness of the model is tested with sensitivity analysis. After these analyzes it is obtained that this paper provides a unique perspective to the literature due to its originality in both the subject and adopted fuzzy methodology.