A novel MADM model integrating hybrid information for evaluating the development prospects of urban new energy vehicles

As an effective approach to mitigating urban environmental issues, New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) have become a focal point of research regarding their current development status and future prospects in China. Addressing the significant disparities in the development of the NEVs industry across different cities, this study focuses on ten typical Chinese cities and develops a novel multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) framework to evaluate the prospects of NEVs promotion in these cities. The study first establishes a comprehensive indicator system that covers key dimensions such as economy, policy support, infrastructure, technological innovation, and environment, encompassing five different types of evaluation information. This system incorporates five different types of evaluation information: exact numbers, interval numbers, triangular fuzzy numbers, hesitant fuzzy numbers, and probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTS), enhancing the framework’s ability to handle diverse data types. Subsequently, the improved entropy (IEntropy) weight method is employed to determine the objective weights of the evaluation indicators. These objective weights are then integrated with the Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method, facilitating a structured group decision-making approach that synthesizes hybrid evaluation information. Based on modular thinking, hybrid evaluation information is synthesized to evaluate and rank the NEVs development prospects of each city. Sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis further demonstrate the robustness and reliability of the proposed MADM framework. The ranking results indicate that Shanghai and Guangzhou lead in NEVs promotion, while cities like Harbin and Zhengzhou lag behind. Based on these findings, the study proposes targeted policy recommendations to promote the sustainable development of the NEVs industry in major Chinese cities.