Intuitionistic fuzzy hierarchical multi-criteria decision making for evaluating performances of low-carbon tourism scenic spots

Abstract

Low-carbon tourism is an effective solution to cope with the goal conflict between developing tourist economy and responding to carbon emission reduction and ecological environment protection. Tourism scenic spots are important carriers of tourist activities and play a crucial role in low-carbon tourism. There are multiple factors affecting the low-carbon performance of a tourism scenic spot, and thus the performance evaluation and ranking of low-carbon tourism scenic spots can be framed as a hierarchical multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. This paper develops a novel method to tackle hierarchical MCDM problems, in which the importance preferences of criteria over the decision goal and sub-criteria with respect to the upper-level criterion are provided by linguistic-term-based pairwise comparisons and the assessments of alternatives over each of sub-criteria at the lowest level are furnished by positive interval values. The linguistic-term-based pairwise comparison matrices are converted into intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations and an approach is developed to obtain the global importance weights of the lowest level sub-criteria. A multiplicatively normalized intuitionistic fuzzy decision matrix is established from the interval-value-based assessments of alternatives and a method is proposed to determine the intuitionistic fuzzy value based comprehensive scores of alternatives. A case study is offered to illustrate how to build a performance evaluation index system of low-carbon tourism scenic spots located at Zhejiang Province of China and show the use of the proposed intuitionistic fuzzy hierarchical MCDM method.