An integrated group decision-making technique under interval-valued probabilistic linguistic T-spherical fuzzy information and its application to the selection of cloud storage provider

Abstract

<abstract> <p>Cloud storage is crucial in today's digital era due to its accessibility, scalability, cost savings, collaboration and enhanced security features. The selection of a reliable cloud storage provider is a significant multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problem that involves intrinsic relationships among the various alternatives, attributes and decision DMs. Due to the uncertain and incomplete nature of the evaluation data for cloud storage providers, i.e., quality of service and user feedback, the identification of appropriate cloud storage providers with accurate service ranking remains an open research challenge. To address the above-mentioned challenge, this work proposes the concept of interval-valued probabilistic linguistic T-spherical fuzzy set (IVPLt-SFS). Then, some basic operations and a score function are defined to compare two or more IVPLt-SF numbers (IVPLt-SFNs). For information fusion, two aggregation operators for IVPLt-SFN are also developed. Next, an extended TOPSIS method-based group decision-making technique under interval-valued probabilistic linguistic T-spherical fuzzy information is established to solve the MAGDM problem. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the practicability and usefulness of the designed approach and its suitability as a decision-making tool for selecting a cloud storage provider. Comparative and sensitivity analysis confirmed that this paper enriches the theory and methodology of the selection problem of cloud storage provider and MAGDM analysis.</p> </abstract>