Evaluation of Propulsion Technologies for Sustainable Road Freight Distribution Using a Dual Probabilistic Linguistic Group Decision-Making Approach

Abstract

For the first time, this study addresses the problem of evaluating propulsion technologies for sustainable road freight distribution from the multicriteria group decision-making perspective. It aims to help logistics companies involved in global supply chains significantly reduce GHG emissions from freight distribution activities. To evaluate sustainable propulsion technologies, this article introduces a novel group decision-making approach with DPL term sets, which takes into account the simultaneous occurrence of stochastic and nonstochastic uncertainty. Since the existing methods do not consider the dependency among multiple numbers of criteria, the evaluation results become insignificant. To overcome this, we employ the Archimedean operations on DPL elements to develop DPL weighted Archimedean Maclaurin symmetric mean operator. For measuring the weights of criteria, an optimization model using a cross-entropy measure of DPL elements is developed. A case study for one of the major logistics companies in Serbia is presented to exhibit the relevance of the suggested approach, as well as offer decision-making guidelines in real-world settings. The research findings show that hybrid electric trucks are the most advantageous propulsion technology solution to reduce GHG emissions from distribution activities. The superiority of the proposed approach is demonstrated through the comparative investigation.