Nowadays sustainability and transportation concepts have been incorporated by the authorities and engineers. The indicator of this situation is the introduction of hybrid vehicles into the market. For the consumers, the purchasing process of hybrid vehicles is not easy because of the many alternatives with different brands including different properties. This process is considered a multi criteria problem with multi alternatives. This paper aims to develop a solution methodology for this problem of a company. The proposed methodology integrates the Interval Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy (IVIF) sets and two Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods; Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Multi Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison (MABAC). With the help of IVIF sets, the fuzziness in the structures of the decision problem and decision-making process is overcome. The IVIF AHP evaluation has revealed the importance that consumers attach to the criteria. According to the IVIF AHP results, each of the criteria has a similar weight. According to the IVIF MABAC results, the ranking order of the hybrid vehicle alternatives is specified as A1–A2–A3–A5–A4. The advantage of the integrated IVIF AHP and IVIF MABAC approach is that it helps in evaluating the most suitable alternatives when there is a disagreement about the relative suitability of the criteria and requires less numerical calculations. The results and the comparative analysis conducted in the study also support this situation.
This study proposes a novel method called the “Integrative Reference Point Approach (IRPA)” as an alternative method to existing MCDM methods. The basis of the newly proposed method is the satisfaction function and the reference set approach. Three different applications are performed to verify the validity of the proposed method from the perspective of optimal alternative rankings and sensitivity to changes in criteria weights. All results of comparative and sensitivity analyses show that the novel method is moderately sensitive to changes in criteria weights and compatible with other methods.