Evaluation and Selection of HazMat Transportation Alternatives: A PHFLTS- and TOPSIS-Integrated Multi-Perspective Approach.

Zhen-Song Chen,Wen-Tao Kong,Kwai-Sang Chin,Min Li

doi:10.3390/ijerph16214116

Abstract

Outsourcing the hazardous materials (HazMat) transportation is an effective way for manufacturing enterprises to avoid risks and accidents as well as to retain sustainable development in economic growth and social inclusion while not bringing negative impacts on the public and the environment. It is imperative to develop viable and effective approaches to selecting the most appropriate HazMat transportation alternatives. This paper aims at proposing an integrated multi-criteria group decision making approach that combines proportional hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (PHFLTS) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to address the problem of HazMat transportation alternative evaluation and selection. PHFLTSs are adopted to represent the congregated individual evaluations in a bid to avoid information loss and increase the reliability of results. Two weight assignment models are then proposed to determine the comprehensive weights of experts and criteria. Furthermore, several novel manipulations of PHFLTS are also defined to enrich its applicability. The TOPSIS method is subsequently extended to the context of PHFLTSs to rank alternatives and choose the best one. Eventually, the feasibility and validity of the proposed approach are verified by a practical case study of a HazMat transportation alternative evaluation and selection decision and further comparison analyses.

Highlights

With the development of industrialization and socialization, the production and transportation requirements of hazardous materials (HazMat) are increasing synchronously
We propose two comprehensive weight assignment models, which integrate the subjective preference with objective information to determine the weights of experts and criteria based on the distance and entropy measures of proportional hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (PHFLTS), respectively
We propose a novel integrated multiple criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) method, namely, the proportional hesitant fuzzy linguistic (PHFL)-TOPSIS, to address the problem of evaluating and selecting the HazMat transportation alternatives

Summary

Introduction

With the development of industrialization and socialization, the production and transportation requirements of hazardous materials (HazMat) are increasing synchronously. The usage of HazMat could bring the growth of economy and the facilitation of daily life, while leads to catastrophic losses in life, economy, environment, and society once accidents happened during the process of HazMat transportation since HazMat are generally related to five harmful properties, which exactly mean toxicity, ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity and infectivity [1]. The HazMat transportation accidents may harm the human life and cause social panic because the harmful characteristics of hazardous substances; the economic losses occurred because the traffic congestion, materials loss and production delays resulted by HazMat transportation accidents; and the air pollution, water pollution, and land pollution may be caused by the toxic releases in the accidents. Public Health 2019, 16, 4116; doi:10.3390/ijerph16214116 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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