Interval-valued probabilistic uncertain linguistic information for decision-making: selection of hydrogen production methodology

As a promising option, Hydrogen as a clean energy alternative has been acknowledged for emissions alleviation and environmental safety. Life cycle sustainability evaluation of hydrogen can help the experts choose the desirable sustainable methodology for hydrogen production in life cycle standard over various options. This paper proposes a sustainable approach for selecting apt hydrogen production methodologies by integrating life cycle sustainability evaluation and an uncertain linguistic multi-attribute decision-making approach. As a useful extension to linguistic models, probabilistic uncertain linguistic term sets (PULTSs) have attracted many scholars. Elicitation of precise occurring probability value for each uncertain linguistic term is an interesting and open challenge. Occurring probability values are considered interval numbers with lower and upper limits associated with each uncertain linguistic term to form interval-valued probabilistic uncertain linguistic term sets (IVPULTSs). Various operations and axioms of the IVPULTS concept are discussed. Next, a novel aggregation operator is proposed under the IVPULTS context for aggregating decision expert’s preferences. Criteria weights are computed using the extended statistical variance approach on the IVPULTS environment, and the popular VIKOR method is extended on IVPULTSs for the best hydrogen production methodology selection. Here, four hydrogen production methodologies are chosen viz., coal gasification, steam reformation of methane, biomass gasification, and water electrolysis to realize the developed framework's applicability. Biomass Gasification is considered a viable option in this study. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of the introduced approach are discussed by comparing it with other approaches.