Improving sustainable supplier evaluation by an integrated MCDM method under pythagorean fuzzy environment

Abstract

Sustainability plays a significant role in promoting competence and collaboration in supply chain management due to increased environmental awareness, tightened regulations, and government policies. The evaluation of sustainable suppliers and selecting the best one is indispensable for companies to promote sustainability. Due to multi-criteria nature of the supplier selection process, it has been considered as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem in many studies. In this study, a state-of-the-art MCDM method for sustainable supplier selection is developed by integrating AHP and TOPSIS techniques within the Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets (PFSs) linguistic setting. A Group Decision Making (GDM) environment is utilized due to superiority of group consensus over individual decisions. Finally, an apparel industry example is used to illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed sustainable supplier selection method. A comparison with existing techniques and sensitivity analysis are done to verify and validate the given outcome.