A group decision framework for core competitiveness evaluation of small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises under probabilistic linguistic term sets

Since the reform and opening up, China’s foreign trade has developed rapidly. The import and export trade volume has doubled, and the team of foreign trade enterprises is constantly expanding. After China’s accession to the WTO and the liberalization of foreign trade management rights, a group of small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises have grown up in recent years and are becoming a new force in the development of China’s foreign trade industry. So, how to make these enterprises grow and grow in the international market competition, and focus on cultivating the core competitiveness of small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises, has become a strategic issue related to the overall development of foreign trade. Recently, COmbinative Distance-based ASsessment (CODAS) method computes the Euclidean distances as the primary measure and Hamming distances as the secondary measure to assess alternatives based on predetermined attribute. Moreover, the probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) are effective tool for depicting uncertainty of the multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems. The core competitiveness evaluation of small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises is a classical MAGDM. In this paper, the CODAS method is extended to the MAGDM with PLTSs. Firstly, the definition of PLSs is introduced. Then, on the basis of the classical CODAS method, the PL-CODAS method is proposed to cope with MAGDM under PLTSs and its significant characteristic is that it can fully consider PLED and PLHD. Finally, a practical example for core competitiveness evaluation of small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises is given to verify the developed approach and some comparative analysis was also given to verify the PL-CODAS approach.