A social participatory allocation network method with partial relations of alternatives and its application in sustainable food supply chain selection

Abstract

Choosing a good food supply chain is helpful for realizing the coordination of economic benefits and environmental optimization, so as to promote the sustainable development of the society. To solve such a problem, we need to ensure the accuracy of the original information and the validity of the aggregated information. However, experts may not be able to give professional evaluations in some aspects, and a simple ranking of alternatives cannot accurately reflect the relations between alternatives. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a comprehensive method integrating the social participatory allocation network (SPAN) and ORESTE methods under the q-rung orthopair fuzzy environment. To better deal with the imprecise and uncertain information, the q-rung orthopair fuzzy set is adopted in this study to represent decision-makers’ opinions. The delegate mechanism of the SPAN method is introduced to calculate the weights of experts, which make the assessments of alternatives credible. The ORESTE method is used to explore the relations between alternatives in detail. The preference function is used to deal with the case where the data is not ordinal. Finally, a case study concerning the selection of sustainable food supply chains is presented to verify the applicability of the proposed method.