An Entropy-Based Method for Probabilistic Linguistic Group Decision Making and its Application of Selecting Car Sharing Platforms

Gai-Li Xu,Jiu-Ying Dong,Shu-Ping Wan

doi:10.15388/20-infor423

Abstract

As the tourism and mobile internet develop, car sharing is becoming more and more popular. How to select an appropriate car sharing platform is an important issue to tourists. The car sharing platform selection can be regarded as a kind of multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems. The probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS) is a powerful tool to express tourists’ evaluations in the car sharing platform selection. This paper develops a probabilistic linguistic group decision making method for selecting a suitable car sharing platform. First, two aggregation operators of PLTSs are proposed. Subsequently, a fuzzy entropy and a hesitancy entropy of a PLTS are developed to measure the fuzziness and hesitancy of a PLTS, respectively. Combining the fuzzy entropy and hesitancy entropy, a total entropy of a PLTS is generated. Furthermore, a cross entropy between PLTSs is proposed as well. Using the total entropy and cross entropy, DMs’ weights and attribute weights are determined, respectively. By defining preference functions with PLTSs, an improved PL-PROMETHEE approach is developed to rank alternatives. Thereby, a novel method is proposed for solving MAGDM with PLTSs. A car sharing platform selection is examined at length to show the application and superiority of the proposed method.

Highlights

With the development of mobile internet and “Internet +”, sharing economy, such as traffic-sharing, health care-sharing and food-sharing, has boomed in recent years
Thereby, the car sharing platform selection can be considered as a kind of multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) (Xu et al, 2016; Wan et al, 2015; Dong et al, 2018; Kou et al, 2020; Zhang et al, 2019)
To make up for above limitations, this paper proposes a novel method for solving MAGDM problems with probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS)

Summary

Introduction

With the development of mobile internet and “Internet +”, sharing economy, such as traffic-sharing, health care-sharing and food-sharing, has boomed in recent years. Carsharing, a new mode of traffic-sharing, is becoming more and more popular along with the development of tourism. Car sharing platform is important for tourists. Since the car sharing platforms are often evaluated in safety, convenience, the brand of car and so on, the selection of car sharing platform can be described as a kind of multi-attribute decision making problems. More than one tourist (decision maker, shorted by DM) decides which car sharing platform is selected. Thereby, the car sharing platform selection can be considered as a kind of multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) (Xu et al, 2016; Wan et al, 2015; Dong et al, 2018; Kou et al, 2020; Zhang et al, 2019)

Methods

Results

Conclusion