An interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy TOPSIS approach for service quality evaluation of bike-sharing providers under uncertain environment

Facing the increasing bicycle providers in the market, it becomes a focus problem for companies to improve differentiated service strategies in this fierce market. Prior research has successively carried out service quality evaluation of bike-sharing providers using various quantitative methods. However, lots of methods cannot accurately adjust the representation range of uncertain information. Besides, service quality is involved of various quantifiable and non-quantifiable criteria. Moreover, considering the fact that different people hold different perceptions, it may be difficult for them to make accurate judgments under fuzzy environment. To address the aforementioned issues, this study places a specific research regarding the bike-sharing enterprise service level from four main dimensions, including perceptibility, availability, dependability and sustainability, and a novel group decision making approach is developed to evaluate bike-sharing service quality using extended Techniques for Order Preferences by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) under interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy environment. The extended group decision making approach is characterized by the interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy set (IVPFS), which has a good ability to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity and imprecision in the decision-making process, and enables decision makers to make more accurate and reliable judgments with considering the subjective nature of human judgments under fuzzy conditions. Finally, experiments are carried out to verify the viability and effectiveness of the proposed approach, and the results show that the proposed approach is effective and efficient to help decision makers to select optimal bicycle providers.