Abstract
The third-party platform named ECO system is used by many transnational companies to monitor the sustainability performance of their global suppliers because of its easiness and shareability. Nonetheless, methods used in this platform for evaluating and calculating the sustainability performance of the alternative suppliers are criticized for their lack of accuracy. In response to these problems, this paper presents a heterogeneous multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method based on interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy--an acronym in Portuguese for interactive multi-criteria decision making (IVIF--TODIM) to improve the efficiency of the evaluation model. Considering the varying features of evaluation criteria, i.e., either quantitative or qualitative, the evaluation values under different criteria are expressed in their appropriate information types. In this paper, a general method based on the relative closeness to the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is applied for aggregating the heterogeneous assessment information, including crisp numbers, interval numbers, and triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs), into interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IVIFNs). Then, the TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for interactive multi-criteria decision making) is extended and employed to prioritize the alternative suppliers. Finally, the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a practical example of polymer manufacturing company and a comparison analysis with existing methods.
Highlights
Faced with environmental pollution, resource starvation, and the intensification of competition, sustainable development has been considered as a consensus among countries, organizations, and academic institutions [1]
Since the membership degree and non-membership degree of an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IVIFNs) are intervals rather than crisp numbers, it is more reasonable to use the ranges of quasi-satisfactory degree (Qsd), quasi-dissatisfactory degree (Qdd), and quasi-uncertain degree (Qud), which are named as quasi-satisfactory interval (Qsi), quasi-dissatisfactory interval (Qdi), and quasi-uncertain interval (Qui), respectively, as the measurement of the decision makers’ preference
The inconsistency in the ranking results can be explained by the following reasons: (1) Intuitionistic fuzzy numbers are used by the fuzzy TOPSIS method to evaluate the sustainability performance of the suppliers, while the heterogeneous information is adopted in the proposed method and aggregated into IVIFN
Summary
Resource starvation, and the intensification of competition, sustainable development has been considered as a consensus among countries, organizations, and academic institutions [1]. 2. The assessment information, in relation to different evaluation criteria in sustainable supplier selection problems, comprises objective quantitative statistical data, and contains some subjective judgement data given by decision makers with their knowledge and experience. In view of the above problems, this paper proposes a heterogeneous multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method to improve the performance of the ECO system for addressing sustainable supplier evaluation problems. Considering the uncertainties involved in the sustainability performance evaluation of decision makers on alternative suppliers, the TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for interactive multi-criteria decision-making) method is extended to the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (IVIF) environment and named the IVIF-TODIM method to produce the ranking order of all alternative suppliers.
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