Evaluation of Cleaner Production for Gold Mines Employing a Hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach

Implementing cleaner production (CP) is effective to resolve the contradiction between economic growth and environmental crisis. To avoid destroying the ecological environment in the exploitation process of mineral resources, CP has been developed in many gold mines to achieve the goal of sustainable development. Thus, this paper aims to propose a favorable approach to assess CP for gold mines. First, according to the specific characteristics of gold mines, an evaluation criteria system of CP is established. Meanwhile, considering the diversity of evaluation information, crisp numbers and probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) are adopted to indicate the quantitative and qualitative information, respectively. Subsequently, a modified experts grading method based on PLTSs is proposed to calculate the sub-criteria weights’ values. Following this, an extended Tomada de Decisão Interativa Multicritério (TODIM) method with hybrid evaluation values is presented to obtain the ranking order. Finally, the hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach is applied to a case of assessing CP for gold mines to demonstrate its feasibility. Furthermore, the robustness and advantages of this approach are justified by sensitivity and comparison analyses. The results show that the proposed approach is feasible to solve such kinds of evaluation problems with hybrid decision making information and can provide some managerial suggestions for government and enterprises.

Linguistic neutrosophic Hamacher aggregation operators and the application in evaluating land reclamation schemes for mines

Land reclamation has become a significant way for the improvement of ecological environment in mining areas. When selecting the optimal land reclamation scheme, LNNs (linguistic neutrosophic numbers) are suitable to describe the complex fuzzy evaluation information through linguistic truth, indeterminacy and falsity membership degrees. Furthermore, the Hamacher aggregation operators are good tools to handle multi-criteria decision making problems. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to extend Hamacher aggregation operators with LNNs and then build a decision making framework for evaluating land reclamation schemes in mining areas. First, new operational laws of LNNs based on Hamacher t-norm and t-conorm are defined. Then, several linguistic neutrosophic Hamacher aggregation operators, including the linguistic neutrosophic Hamacher weighted mean aggregation operators and linguistic neutrosophic Hamacher hybrid weighted mean aggregation operators are developed. Meanwhile, their desirable properties are proved. Thereafter, a method for decision making with linguistic neutrosophic information based on these operators is proposed to deal with complex decision problems. At last, the validity of this method is confirmed by an illustrative example of evaluating the land reclamation schemes in mining areas. In addition, the impact of the parameter in extended Hamacher aggregation operators is discussed. The merits of the proposed method are also highlighted by comparing with other decision making methods. The results show that the proposed linguistic neutrosophic Hamacher aggregation operators have great flexibility and advantages, and can provide powerful ways for the evaluation of land reclamation schemes.