Sustainable supplier selection in intuitionistic fuzzy environment: a decision-making perspective
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to attempt supplier selection considering economic, environmental and social sustainability issues.
Design/methodology/approach
Subjective human judgment bears some kind of vagueness and ambiguity; fuzzy set theory has immense potential to overcome this. Owing to the advantage of intuitionistic fuzzy numbers set over classical fuzzy numbers set; three decision-making approaches have been applied here in intuitionistic fuzzy setting (namely, intuitionistic-TOPSIS, intuitionistic-MOORA and intuitionistic-GRA) to facilitate supplier selection in sustainable supply chain.
Findings
The stated objective of this research “to verify application potential of different decision support systems (in intuitionistic fuzzy setting) in the context of sustainable supplier selection” has been carried out successfully. A case empirical research has been conducted by applying three different decision-making approaches: intuitionistic fuzzy-TOPSIS, intuitionistic fuzzy-MOORA and intuitionistic fuzzy-GRA to an empirical data set of sustainable supplier selection problem. The ranking orders thus obtained through exploration of aforesaid three approaches have been explored and compared.
Originality/value
As compared to generalized fuzzy numbers, intuitionistic fuzzy numbers exhibit a membership degree, a non-membership degree and the extent of hesitation; a better way to capture inconsistency, incompleteness and imprecision of human judgment. Application potential of aforesaid three decision support approaches has been demonstrated in this reporting for a case sustainable supplier selection.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Authors gratefully acknowledge the support rendered by Professor Gunasekaran the Editor-In-Chief of Benchmarking: An International Journal. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable constructive comments and suggestions to prepare the paper a good contributor.
Citation
Sen, D.K., Datta, S. and Mahapatra, S.S. (2018), "Sustainable supplier selection in intuitionistic fuzzy environment: a decision-making perspective", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 25 No. 2, pp. 545-574. https://doi.org/10.1108/BIJ-11-2016-0172
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited