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

Abstract

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.