An Improved PL-VIKOR Model for Risk Evaluation of Technological Innovation Projects with Probabilistic Linguistic Term Sets

Risk evaluation is a primary but important task for technological innovation projects and this task is a multiple criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) process with probabilistic uncertainty and fuzzy uncertainty. Compromise programming decision-making methods with probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) are more appropriate for risk evaluation of technological innovation projects. This paper proposes a new approach named improved probabilistic linguistic-vise kriterijumska optimizacija kompromisno resenje (PL-VIKOR) method with probabilistic linguistic term sets for risk evaluation of technological innovation projects. Firstly, by fully considering both the relationship between each alternative and the positive ideal solution and the relationship between each alternative and negative ideal solution, the improved PL-VIKOR method for dealing with MCGDM problems is developed to make up the deficiency of the traditional PL-VIKOR method. Then, the improved PL-VIKOR method is applied to solve a practical MCGDM problem with probabilistic linguistic term sets involving the risk evaluation of technologically innovative projects for venture capital. Finally, we make some comparative analyses between the improved PL-VIKOR method and some existing methods to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed method. The results reflect that the improved PL-VIKOR method is more reasonable when calculating the distance measure between two PLTSs, and it can make the risk evaluation of technological innovation project MCGDM with PLTSs more objective.