A Pythagorean fuzzy ANP-QFD-Grey relational analysis approach to prioritize design requirements of sustainable supply chain

Abstract

A sustainable supply chain (SSC) is vital for company’s sustainability success, so it is imperative to identify and prioritize SSC’s design requirements (DRs) for better SSC planning. For customer-centric markets, the customer requirements (CRs) need to be integrated into SSC’s DRs. This paper thus proposes a customer-centric approach based on Analytic Network Process (ANP), Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Grey Relational Analysis (GRA), and Pythagorean Fuzzy Set (PFS) to rank SSC’s DRs, considering CRs and information ambiguity. The PFS is combined with ANP, QFD, and GRA to better handle uncertainty in the SSC. The Pythagorean fuzzy ANP is applied to analyze the correlations among the sustainable CRs and determine the corresponding weights. The sustainable CRs are transformed into the DRs using the Pythagorean fuzzy QFD. The relationships among the resulting DRs are analyzed through Pythagorean fuzzy GRA to prioritize DRs. The approach is validated through a case study. The results obtained in this paper shows that the proposed method is efficient to prioritize DRs of SSC with the consideration of sustainable CRs under uncertain environment. The novelties of proposed method are that it not only offers a customer-oriented SSC planning method through the integration of ANP, QFD and GRA, but also can reflect the uncertain information with a broader membership representation space via PFSs. Based on the proposed method, the decision-maker can conduct comprehensive analysis to prioritize DRs and design appropriate SSC to fulfill CRs under uncertain environment.