An efficient 2-tuple linguistic cubic q-rung orthopair fuzzy CILOS-TOPSIS method: evaluating the hydrological geographical regions for watershed management in Pakistan

Watershed factors often have overlapping influences. Group decision-making helps account for these ambiguities for better management strategies. To address this issue, the goal of this study is to provide a creative and unique tool known as a 2-tuple linguistic cubic q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (2TLCuq-ROFS) model. For dealing with uncertain and ambiguous information in multi-attribute group decision-making problems, the 2TLCuq-ROF framework is more efficient and superior to other fuzzy sets. The fundamental concept of 2TLCuq-ROFS is reviewed first, followed by the distance formula and operational rules of 2TLCuq-ROF numbers. We propose four novel weighted aggregation operators utilizing 2TLCuq-ROFNs in order to efficiently aggregate the values to investigate a group decision-making problems. Furthermore, the proposed operators combined with the power averaging (PA) operator to establish an extension of the technique for order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) method in the 2TLCuq-ROF environment to show the optimal altenative. After that, a multi-attribute group decision-making approach is proposed to resolve a decision-making problem related to watersheds’ hydrological geographical areas, which is the main contribution of this research. The criterion impact loss (CILOS) method is used to determine the weight information of attributes under the 2TLCuq-ROF environment. In this proposed methodology, we incorporate the independent decisions of all experts on the capabilities of alternatives in accordance with their attributes and then rank the alternatives. In addition, we perform the sensitivity and comparative analyses to explain the efficacy of the proposed methodology and the consistency of the results.