Investigating organizational characteristics for sustainable supply chain planning under fuzziness

Abstract

Sustainable supply chains are essential to sustain modern business growth and ensure healthy market environment. In this chapter, we address the important characteristics that constituent organizations of supply chains should possess in order to achieve the social, economic and environmental objectives of sustainability. These characteristics (criteria) are obtained using Affinity Diagram. Then, a committee of decision makers is formed to provide linguistic ratings to the candidate organizations (alternatives) against the selected criteria. The linguistic ratings are then transformed into fuzzy numbers and subject to multicriteria decision making technique called VIKOR for sustainability assessment of organizations. A numerical illustration is provided to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach.© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.