An Integrated Agricultural–Cultural Information System for Ethnic Costume Design Effectiveness Evaluation: A Dual-Reference Neutrosophic Fuzzy Modeling Approach

Ethnic costume design must balance two goals that often conflict: preserving cultural authenticity and achieving practical, modern effectiveness. This paper proposes a new evaluation framework that models this tension explicitly through two reference profiles: a Heritage Reference and a Contemporary Reference. Expert and user assessments are represented with a neutrosophic–fuzzy structure to capture graded preference together with ambiguity and disagreement. This paper ranks competing costume designs using a correlation–distance fusion scheme: correlation captures pattern consistency with each reference, while distance captures numerical closeness. A key novelty is a calibration stage that tunes the framework's reference parameters using observed decision consistency, reducing arbitrariness and improving stability. A complete case study on ethnic costume prototypes demonstrates how the proposed approach separates “heritage-strong” designs from “modern-effective” designs and provides an interpretable final effectiveness index that can be adjusted to different stakeholder priorities.