A novel Hellinger distance-based regret theory method for spherical fuzzy decision making model and its application in logistics

Actual decision making problems are often based on the company decision maker's behavior factors, such as risk attitude, subjective preference, etc. Regret theory can well express the behavior of the decision maker. In this pursuit, a novel decision making method was developed, based on the regret theory for the multi-attribute decision making problem, in which attribute values were expressed by spherical fuzzy numbers. Distance measurement not only has extensive applications in fields such as pattern recognition and image processing, but also plays an important role in the research of fuzzy decision theory. The existing distance measures of spherical fuzzy set either have special cases of anti-intuition or are more complex in calculation, so finding suitable distance measures is also an important research topic in the decision-making theory of spherical fuzzy set. For this reason, we first establish a new distance of spherical fuzzy sets based on Hellinger distance of probability distribution. A decision maker's perception utility value function is proposed using the new distance formula, which is used to measure the regretful and rejoice value. Then we establish an optimization model for solving the attribute weights, when the information of attribute weight was partially known. Subsequently, the comprehensive perceived utility values were utilized to rank the order of the alternatives. Finally, a numerical example of assessment of logistics providers is used to show that the new decision making method is effective and feasible.