What is it about?
Date fruits occupy an important place among different fruits and are very important in the agricultural and food industries because of the versatile nutritional and health benefits that they offer, including their ability to reducing high cholesterol and triglyceride levels. However, the effectiveness of different date varieties in addressing these health issues remains an open question. The complexity of the evaluation of nutritional content stems from the uncertainty and inconsistency in the judgments of experts, the challenges of weighing multiple nutritional criteria, and the ability to manage the trade-offs between them. To address this, we produced a new dataset for food varieties consisting of 12 date fruit varieties (DFVs), incorporating 60 subcriteria across six primary nutritional criteria. The methodology subsequently developed a six-layered decision matrix (DM), formulated the mathematical process of spherical fuzzy numbers (SFNs), spherical fuzzy Z-numbers (SFZNs), fuzzy weighted zero-consistency (FWZIC) methods, and adaptive entropy methods to ensure the appropriate balance between the criteria and capture the trade-offs inherent in nutritional evaluation. Additionally, a modified weighted integrated sum product (WISP) method is employed to ensure precise benchmarking of the 12 DFVs. The SFZN-FWZIC results effectively handled the uncertainty and inconsistency in the fifteen expert judgments and developed reliable weights of nutritional criteria and subcriteria. The WISP model identifies Ajwa Al Madinah as the top-performing variety with a total utility of 0.8086 through 12 DFV analyses. This approach enhances fuzzy decision-making theory and provides practical guidance for stakeholders in the agricultural and food sectors. The results offer essential insights to inform decisions related to the production, consumption, and marketing of DFVs.
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Why is it important?
• Developed Date Fruit Varieties (DFVs) dataset. • Developed a Six-Layered Decision Matrix for evaluating 12 DFVs. • Integrated SFZNs-FWZIC for handling expert judgments with uncertainty. • Benchmarked 12 DFVs under each nutritional content and six primary criteria. • Conducted sensitivity analysis confirming the robustness of the new methodology.
Perspectives
The evaluation and benchmarking methodology in the study is well developed with careful assessments to benchmark date varieties on the basis of complex nutritional contents via SFZNs and WESP. This has been achieved by integrating the fifteen expert judgments and applying the developed mathematical process for the evaluation of nutritional criteria and benchmarking the DFV alternatives. The developed model addresses the limitations of traditional methods by integrating uncertainty management and MCDM. The developed methodology provided a more comprehensive and accurate evaluation of nutritional criteria and sub-criteria via the six-layered DM. The study introduces a new dataset tailored for this analysis. The collected dataset for food varieties consisted of two dimensions: six nutritional criteria and alternatives (12 DFVs). The new data can enhance the developed methodology in terms of practical application for nutritionists, agricultural scientists, and policymakers in selecting optimal date varieties. Additionally, the methodology phases offer an adaptive and precise framework and ensure robust results through sensitivity analysis. The six different relative importance weights were used to test scenario robustness in the sensitivity analysis evaluation. The results showed that the rankings of DFVs were remarkably stable even if the weight vectors changed. This work advances both theoretical and practical dimensions, contributing significantly to nutritional benchmarking and decision-making models in agriculture. To extend the knowledge on the assessment and benchmarking of DFVs, several directions are suggested for future research. First, other types of data should be compared to verify the reliability of the current assessment and improve the framework by identifying additional characteristics. Research can also explore the health effects of nutritional contents and DFVs on diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure to understand the overall benefits of consuming dates.
Yahya Layth Khaleel
Tikrit University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evaluating date fruit varieties for health benefits using advanced fuzzy decision-making, Expert Systems with Applications, July 2025, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2025.127656.
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