q-Rung orthopair fuzzy prioritized aggregation operators and their application towards green supplier chain management

Abstract

Supply management and environmental concerns are becoming increasingly relevant to scientific decision analysis around the world. Several companies have implemented the green supply chain management (GSCM) approach for attaining economic advantages while retaining sustainable growth for the environment. Green supplier selection has also been analyzed in many literary works as an important part of GSCM, which is considered an important multi-criteria group decision making (MCGDM) problem. The lack of consideration of the relationships of alternatives to the uncertain environment will be the main reason for weak conclusions in some MCGDM problems. To address these drawbacks, we introduce a new approach for selecting green suppliers with the q-rung orthopair fuzzy information, in which the input assessment is considered by using q-rung orthopair fuzzy numbers (q-ROFNs). A q-ROFN is extremely valuable in representing vague information that occurs in these real-world circumstances. The priority relationship of the alternatives to q-rung orthopair fuzzy information is very helpful to deal with GSCM. Consequently, we develop some prioritized operators with q-ROFNs named the q-rung orthopair fuzzy prioritized weighted average (q-ROFPWA) operator and q-rung orthopair fuzzy prioritized weighted geometric (q-ROFPWG) operator. Several important characteristics of these operators such as idempotents, boundary, and monotonicity are also well proven. Finally, an application of the proposed operators is presented for green supplier selection in GSCM. The scientific nature of the proposed methodology is illustrated by a numerical example to validate its rationality, symmetry, and superiority.