A Flexible Decision-Making Method for Green Supplier Selection Integrating TOPSIS and GRA Under the Single-Valued Neutrosophic Environment

Yonghe Sun,Yilin Cai

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3085772

Abstract

The deteriorating environment and growing environmental awareness have created an urgency for selecting green suppliers. Although scholars have put forward many methods for selecting an appropriate green supplier, most of the existing methods are based on the fixed weight system, which causes these methods to fail to cope with complex and dynamic decision-making environment. To solve this problem, we develop a flexible decision model for green supplier selection where entropy, Technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), and grey relational analysis (GRA) are embedded in the single-valued neutrosophic environment. The single-valued neutrosophic set is a superior tool in dealing with uncertainties, while the integration of single-valued set and classic methods for green supplier selection is limited. In this paper, entropy is integrated with the single-valued neutrosophic set to determine the weights of the criteria for green supplier evaluation; the weighted distance of TOPSIS and the weighted similarity of GRA are combined to select the optimal green supplier. The weights of TOPSIS and GRA are flexible; variable weights are assigned to TOPSIS and GRA based on different decision-making environments. A case study, along with comparative analysis, is carried out to prove the availability of our proposed decision model. Results show that our proposed decision model is flexible to accommodate dynamic decision-making issues and has good practicality.

Highlights

In reaction to the worsening environmental problems and the rising environmental awareness, interest in optimizing green supplier selection has emerged in recent years
The proposed methods in previous studies are based on the fixed weight system, lacking flexibility for complex and dynamic decision-making environment
single-valued neutrosophic set (SVNS) is a superior tool in dealing with uncertainty; few scholars have proposed an single-valued neutrosophic (SVN)-based method that may well adapt to the uncertainty and inconsistency in the group decision-making problem

Summary

Introduction

In reaction to the worsening environmental problems and the rising environmental awareness, interest in optimizing green supplier selection has emerged in recent years. Great emphasis has been attached on the selection of green suppliers. Many managers prefer to implement green supplier selection in their enterprises reactively or proactively to satisfy the growing need for environmental protection; they aim to go ahead of the competition in the process. This makes it crucial to conduct appropriate green. Even similar green supplier selection criterion systems vary in the sub-criteria they adopt, which may lead to a difference in the evaluations of suppliers’ green performance for the same supplier

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Methods

Conclusion