A hybrid neutrosophic group ANP-TOPSIS framework for supplier selection problems

Abstract

One of the most significant competitive strategies for organizations is sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). The vital part in the administration of a sustainable supply chain is the sustainable supplier selection, which is a multi-criteria decision-making issue, including many conflicting criteria. The valuation and selection of sustainable suppliers are difficult problems due to vague, inconsistent and imprecise knowledge of decision makers. In the literature on supply chain management for measuring green performance, the requirement for methodological analysis of how sustainable variables affect each other, and how to consider vague, imprecise and inconsistent knowledge, is still unresolved. This research provides an incorporated multi-criteria decision-making procedure for sustainable supplier selection problems (SSSPs). An integrated framework is presented via interval-valued neutrosophic sets to deal with vague, imprecise and inconsistent information that exists usually in real world. The analytic network process (ANP) is employed to calculate weights of selected criteria by considering their interdependencies. For ranking alternatives and avoiding additional comparisons of analytic network processes, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is used. The proposed framework is turned to account for analyzing and selecting the optimal supplier. An actual case study of a dairy company in Egypt is examined within the proposed framework. Comparison with other existing methods is implemented to confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.