An integrated approach to green supplier selection based on the interval type-2 fuzzy best-worst and extended VIKOR methods

Abstract

Green supply chain management, which considers both the environment and supply chain management, is becoming a hot topic in modern operations management. In a manufacturing enterprise, it is crucial for supply chain managers to select an appropriate supplier for their long-term development prospects to and to pursue the business strategy and remain in a competitive position. Green supplier selection (GSS) can be viewed as a multiple-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problem that involves many unmeasurable and conflicting criteria. Considering the advantage of interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs) in modeling such complexity and uncertainty, this study provides an integrated methodology to address MCGDM problems based on the best-worst method (BWM) and the VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) technique in an interval type-2 fuzzy environment. First, we extend a new decision-making method called the BWM to IT2FSs. Unlike the BWM and fuzzy BWM, our IT2FSs stem from a questionnaire survey and related interval approaches. Second, we develop an integrated model based on interval type-2 fuzzy BWM and VIKOR to solve MCGDM problems. Finally, we present a GSS example to illustrate on the performance of our approach. We also provide sensitivity and comparative analyses and a discussion of the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.