Battery supplier development for new energy vehicles by a probabilistic linguistic UTASTAR method

Abstract

New energy vehicles can improve the environmental pollution and thus benefit people’s healthy life. As a core component of new energy vehicles, batteries play a crucial role in the performance of new energy vehicles. There are many factors to be considered when selecting the battery for a new energy vehicle, so it can be regarded as a MCDM problem. This study builds a useful model by combining the PLTS with the UTASTAR method. Firstly, to represent the uncertain and fuzzy information of experts, we use the PLTSs to accurately express the linguistic information of experts. Given that the weights of criteria are often different and there are some preferences for criteria among experts, we use the BWM to determine the weights of criteria, which can deal with hesitant information and make the result suitable for experts’ preferences. The method proposed in this study can sort all alternatives based on a small amount of data. To show its applicability, we implement the method in the selection of new energy vehicle battery suppliers. Comparative analysis and discussions are made to verify the effectiveness of the method.