A novel hybrid approach based on intuitionistic fuzzy multi criteria group-decision making for environmental pollution problem

Abstract

Due to the industrial emissions, poor disposal of wastes, mining, deforestation, increased use of fossil fuels and vicious agricultural activities, environmental pollution rapidly arises and becomes one of the most serious problems of the contemporary world. Humanity tries to abstain from living in polluted cities because of its effects adversely to quality of life. As the utilization of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques plays a key role in choosing the most suitable option between all feasible alternatives, this work proposes a hybrid MCDM method to rank the major cities from the least polluted to the most polluted according to the types of pollution. Owing to the capability to tackle imprecise and uncertain decision information, intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) sets are employed as well as some of the important properties of these concepts are studied. An integrated method combines IF Simple Additive Weighting (IF-SAW) for determining the weights of the types of pollution and IF Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) technique for ranking the major cities. In ranking phase, modification and improvement of classical PROMETHEE into the IF environment is accurately implemented. A Group Decision Making (GDM) process which deals with both quantitative and qualitative factors in an uncertain environment is developed. The effectiveness and applicability of the proposed methodology is numerically illustrated with real world data of environmental pollution in major cities and the study showed that IF-PROMETHEE method could be used in environmental pollution problem as an efficient method.