Strategic outsourcing in reverse logistics: Neutrosophic integrated approach with a hierarchical and interactive quality function deployment

Abstract

The efficiency of strategic outsourcing in reverse logistics (RL) depends on stakeholder requirements (SRs) directing organization development and experts’ knowledge decomposing and reconstructing strategic decision, which urges the adoption of hierarchical and interactive quality function deployment (QFD). Considering the uncertainty within a QFD, single valued neutrosophic number (SVNN) is introduced to capture both indeterminacy and inconsistency hidden in quantitive votes and qualitative judgments of stakeholders and experts. With unknown weight assignments, two maximum deviation models are constructed to obtain the priority of SRs and Shapley weights of experts. An SVNN-enabled grey relational analysis is extended to identify the interdependence priority of engineer characterizers (ECs). Due to the interactions among components such as experts in a group or ECs in QFD, two information aggregation tools under neutrosophic environments are presented based on fuzzy integral delineating the positive or negative effect. Built on these, we propose an integrated neutrosophic approach composed of a transformation module, weight module, integration module and QFD analysis module to support the outsourcing decision. Finally, an illustration example is used to confirm the practicality of the proposed approach. Sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis with multiple views have been conducted to show the flexibility and superiority of the given decision.