A three-way decision-making technique based on Pythagorean double hierarchy linguistic term sets for selecting logistic service provider and sustainable transportation investments

Abstract

<abstract><p>Finding the best transportation project and logistic service provider is one for the most important aspects of the development of a country. This task becomes more complicated from time to time as different criteria are involved. Hence, this paper proposes an approach to the linguistic three-way decision-making (TWDs) problem for selecting sustainable transportation investments and logistic service providers with unknown criteria and expert weight information. To this end, we first propose a new tool, the Pythagorean double hierarchy linguistic term sets (PyDHLTSs), which is a combination of first hierarchy linguistic term sets and second hierarchy linguistic term sets which can describe uncertainty and fuzziness more flexibly in decision-making (DM) problems. In addition, we propose some aggregation operators and basic operational laws for PyDHLTSs. A new decision-making technique for PyDHLTSs based on decision-theoretic rough sets (DTRSs) is proposed in the three-way decisions. Next, the conditional probability is computed using grey relational analysis in a PyDHLTSs environment, which improves decision-making. The loss function is computed by using the proposed aggregation operator, and the decision's results are determined by the minimum-loss principle. Finally, a real-world case study of a transportation project and logistic service provider is considered to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods.</p></abstract>