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An Entropy-Based Method for Probabilistic Linguistic Group Decision Making and its Application of Selecting Car Sharing Platforms
Volume 31, Issue 3 (2020), pp. 621–658
Pub. online: 15 July 2020      Type: Research Article      Open accessOpen Access
Received
1 February 2020
Accepted
1 June 2020
Published
15 July 2020

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.

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Biographies

Xu Gai-li

G. Xu is an associate professor at College of Science, Guilin University of Technology. She received her master’s degree from school of Mathematics and Information Science, Guangxi University, China, 2007, and earned her PhD degree from College of Information Technology, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, China, 2017. Up until now, she has contributed 10 journal articles to professional journals. Her research interests include fuzzy mathematics and decision making.

Wan Shu-Ping

S. Wan is a professor at College of Information Technology, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics. He received his PhD degree from College of Information Technology, Nankai University, China, 2005. Up until now, he has contributed over 80 journal articles to professional journals. His research interests include decision making, information fusion and supply chain management.

Dong Jiu-Ying
jiuyingdong@126.com

J. Dong is a professor at School of Statistics, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics. She received her PhD degree from School of Mathematics Sciences, Nankai University, China, 2013. Up until now, she has contributed over 30 journal articles to professional journals. Her research interests include decision making and graph theory.


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Copyright
© 2020 Vilnius University
Open access article under the CC BY license.

Keywords
Multi-attribute decision making Probabilistic linguistic term set Entropy Cross entropy

Funding
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71740021 and 11861034), “Thirteen five” Programming Project of Jiangxi Province Social Science (No. 18GL13), the Humanities Social Science Programming Project of Ministry of Education of China (No. 20YGC1198), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province of China (No. 20192BAB207012), and the Science and Technology Project of Jiangxi Province Educational Department of China (No. GJJ190251), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi Province of China (No. 2019GXNSFAA245031) and the Doctoral Scientific Research Foundation of Guilin University of Technology (No. GUTQDJJ2007033).

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