<p>The three-way decision (TWD) model has been widely applied in multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) in recent years since its excellent interpretability and powerful practical functions. However, there are still some shortcomings in TWD model that prevent its application in real-world problems. First, the equivalence relations of many decision-making methods are too restrictive, which exacerbates the decision-making risk of the model. Second, existing studies indicate that risk aversion parameters have a significant impact on the results of TWD, but how to choose the appropriate parameters remains an unsolved problem. The objective of this paper is to propose an objective TWD model that will address the two aforementioned issues. At first, in order to ensure that the method can be applied to practical problems, we define a method to convert the crisp numbers into q-rung orthopair fuzzy numbers (q-ROFNs), and an ideal positive degree based on q-ROFNs is defined to represent their dominance relations. Secondly, q-rung orthopair fuzzy sequence coverage is proposed to objectively determine the state set and obtain objective conditional probabilities. Finally, a method to objectively calculate the risk aversion parameter is proposed to minimize the decision risk of the model. The proposed model is utilized to evaluate the air quality of different cities and propose targeted management implications based on the experimental results. The scientific validity and robustness of the proposed model are demonstrated through detailed comparative experimental analysis.</p>