Towards a Hybrid Evaluation Approach to Chinese Sustainable Drinking Water Source Regions within an Uncertain Decision Environment

Abstract

Confronted with the increasingly serious water pollution in China, companies are implementing scientific measures to strive for sustainable drinking water source regions (DWSRs). The challenge lies in how to evaluate available DWSRs. Considering the complexity and uncertainty existing in the evaluation process, we deem this process a complicated multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problem. It involves fuzzy decision information, prioritized relationships among different criteria, and distinctively allocated weights of decision makers regarding different alternatives. By utilizing the asymmetrical weak probabilistic hesitant fuzzy elements (P-HFES) to depict fuzzy data, this paper leads a direction to investigating a data-driven MCGDM approach and its application to evaluate available DWSRs. First, considering the common sense that criteria are not always given symmetrical priority, we propose a series of aggregation operators for integrating weak P-HFEs by including the prioritized relationship of criteria. Moreover, the importance weights of criteria and decision makers are objectively determined through a priority-based basic unit interval and monotonic (P-BUM) function and some novel distance measures, respectively. Finally, an evaluation approach is established. It aims to handle MCGDM problems with incomplete weight information regarding the criteria and decision makers in weak probabilistic hesitant fuzzy circumstance. Practically, focusing on evaluating three DWSRs, a realistic example of application is furnished to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach.