A Hybrid Intuitionistic Fuzzy-MEREC-RS-DNMA Method for Assessing the Alternative Fuel Vehicles with Sustainability Perspectives

Alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) offer opportunities to lower fuel costs as well as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and, therefore, they are a feasible option for customers in the market. Due to technological advancements, decisions about suitable alternative fuel vehicles are a challenging problem for fleet operators. This paper aims to introduce a multi-attribute decision-analysis framework to rank and select the "alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs)" for a private home healthcare service provider in Chandigarh, India. The selection of AFVs can be treated as a decision-making problem, because of the presence of various qualitative and quantitative attributes. Thus, the current work introduces an integrated decision-making framework based on intuitionistic fuzzy-"method based on the removal effects of criteria (MEREC)", "ranking sum (RS)", and the "double normalization-based multi-aggregation (DNMA)" framework for assessing the AFVs. The combination of MEREC and RS is applied to assess the objective and subjective weighting values of various parameters for AFV assessment. The DNMA approach is utilized to prioritize the different AFVs over various significant parameters. According to the outcomes, the most significant parameters for AFV assessment are social benefits, fueling/charging infrastructure, and financial incentives, respectively. In this context, globally existing AFVs for the sustainable transportation sector are identified, and then prioritized against fifteen different criteria relevant to the environmental, economic, technological, social, and political aspects of sustainability. It is distinguished that electric vehicles (G(2)), hybrid electric vehicles (G(1)), and hydrogen vehicles (G(3)) achieve higher overall performance compared to the other technologies available in India. The assessment outcomes prove that electric vehicles can serve as a valuable alternative for decreasing carbon emissions and negative effects on the environment. This technology contributes to transportation sector development and job creation in less developed areas of the country. Moreover, a comparison with existing studies and a sensitivity investigation are conferred to reveal the robustness and stability of the developed framework.