agriculture, decision making, interval valued fuzzy soft sets, soft sets, seed selection, Technology, Technology (General), T1-995, Science, Science (General), Q1-390

Nowadays, seed selection is one of the main problems faced by farmers and research into agriculture because of the uncertainties in various factors, such as environmental conditions, quality of seeds etc. Soft set theory introduced by Molodtsov is an efficient modeling technique to handle uncertainty. Hybrid models have been found to be more useful than those relying on one technique. Tripathy et al. introduced very recently the concept of interval valued fuzzy soft sets through the membership function approach. Among the hybrid soft set models, we use the concept of interval valued fuzzy soft sets to select the optimal seeds. In order to illustrate the application of IVFSSs, a decision making algorithm using this notion is proposed and illustrated through an example. This algorithm was applied to a large rice seed data set and the results are encouraging.