Prospect Theory based Hesitant Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Low Sulphur Fuel of Maritime Transportation

The environmental impact of maritime transport has now become a relevant issue in sustainable policy formulation and has attracted increasing interest from academia. For the sustainable development of maritime transport, International Maritime Organization stipulates that the sulfur content of ship emissions will reach 0.5 from 2020. With the approaching of the stipulated implementation date, shipowners need to adopt scientific methods to make decision on low sulfur fuel. In this study, we applied a prospect theory based hesitant fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making model to obtain the optimal decision of low Sulphur marine fuel. For this purpose, the hesitant fuzzy decision matrix is established to collect expert opinions, the maximizing deviation method is adopted to determine criteria weights. According to calculate the Euclidean distance from the reference points, we obtain the comprehensive prospect values of alternatives. Lastly, a case study is carried out to illustrate the significance and effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The innovation of this study is that it is the first-time adopting prospect theory and hesitate fuzzy sets to multi-criteria decision making for low Sulphur marine fuel, which provides an effective decision model for shipping companies under Low Sulphur regulations, and can also be extended to other industries.