The DEMATEL–COPRAS hybrid method under probabilistic linguistic environment and its application in Third Party Logistics provider selection

With the emergence of outsourcing logistics and the rapid development of the e-commerce business, Third Party Logistics (TPL) plays an indispensable role in modern business. In the TPL provider selection process, uncertain information brings more challenges to decision makers. This paper uses probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) to describe uncertain decision making information. Firstly, we propose an improved Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory method, which allows a certain relationship between decision criteria and calculates criteria weights in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems. Then, in order to make full use of uncertain TPL provider information and maximize the values of data, the probabilistic linguistic complex proportional assessment method is proposed and applied to solve the MCDM problems under probabilistic linguistic environment, which needs much less computation than other MCDM methods. Finally, an application example of TPL provider selection is presented to demonstrate the proposed method. A comparative analysis is further conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.