Spherical fuzzy sets (SFSs) provide more free space for decision makers (DMs) to express preference information from four aspects: approval, objection, abstention and refusal. The partitioned Maclaurin symmetric mean (PMSM) operator is an effective information fusion tool, which can fully capture the interrelationships among any multiple attributes in the same block whereas attributes in different block are unrelated. Therefore, in this paper,we first extendPMSM operator to spherical fuzzy environment and develop spherical fuzzy PMSM (SFPMSM) operator as well as spherical fuzzy weighted PMSM (SFWPMSM) operator. Meanwhile, we discuss some properties and special cases of these two operators. To diminish the impact of extreme evaluation values on decision-making results, then we integrate power average (PA) operator and PMSM operator to further develop spherical fuzzy power PMSM (SFPPMSM) operator and spherical fuzzy weighted power PMSM (SFWPPMSM) operator and also investigate their desirable properties. Subsequently, a new multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) method is established based on SFWPPMSM operator under spherical fuzzy environment. Finally, two numerical examples are used to illustrate the proposed method, and comparative analysis with the existing methods to further testy the validity and superiority of the proposed method.

Spherical fuzzy sets are more powerful in modelling the uncertain situations than picture fuzzy sets, fermatean fuzzy sets, Pythagorean fuzzy sets, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, and fuzzy sets. In this paper, we first define the variance and covariance of spherical fuzzy sets. Then, using variance and covariance, we define the unique spherical fuzzy set correlation metric in line with the statistical coefficient of correlation. Two spherical fuzzy sets are correlated in both direction and strength using the provided measure of correlation. We discussed its many characteristics. We compared the measure of correlation with the current ones through linguistic variables. We established its validity by showing its application in bidirectional approximate reasoning. We also resolve a pattern identification issue in the spherical fuzzy environment using the provided correlation function, and we compare the results with several current measurements.