Extension of Fuzzy ELECTRE I for Evaluating Demand Forecasting Methods in Sustainable Manufacturing

Abstract

The selection of a demand forecasting method is critical for companies aiming to avoid manufacturing overproduction or shortages in pursuit of sustainable development. Various qualitative and quantitative criteria with different weights must be considered during the evaluation of a forecasting method. The qualitative criteria and criteria weights are usually assessed in linguistic terms. Aggregating these various criteria and linguistic weights for evaluating and selecting demand forecasting methods in sustainable manufacturing is a major challenge. This paper proposes an extension of fuzzy elimination and choice translating reality (ELECTRE) I to resolve this problem. In the proposed method, fuzzy weighted ratings are defuzzified with the signed distance to develop a crisp ELECTRE I model. Moreover, an extension to ELECTRE I is developed by suggesting an extended modified discordance matrix and a closeness coefficient for ranking alternatives. The proposed extension can overcome the problem of information loss, which can lead to incorrect ranking results when using the Hadamard product to combine concordance and modified discordance matrices. A comparison is conducted to show the advantage of the proposed extension. Finally, a numerical example is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. Furthermore, a numerical comparison is made to display the advantage of the proposed method.