Evaluation of the Fourth Party Logistics Provider Under Neutrosophic Environment

Abstract

The fourth party logistics (4PLs) is an integrator that assembles the resources, capabilities, and technology of the service provider and its client to design, develop, and implement comprehensive supply chain solutions. A 4PLs provider is a technological service provider who owns computer systems and intellectual capital. Choosing the best 4PLs among many alternatives is critical for the firms and it can be considered in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems and includes subjectivity and vagueness data. Fuzzy sets theory is a useful tool to handle such subjectivity and vagueness in the evaluation process. Recently, some extensions of fuzzy sets have been developed to define the uncertainty more comprehensively. Neutrosophic sets are one of the extensions of the fuzzy sets, which, unlike the other extensions, utilizes independent indeterminacy-membership function, thereby extracts significant information and enhances the accuracy of the decision-making process. In this paper, we proposed a neutrosophic MCDM method to evaluate the 4PLs providers’ performance. In the application section, three experts applied neutrosophic linguistic scale to the providers’ performance. Then we calculated the closeness coefficient of each provider and ranked them in descending order. The results pointed out that the proposed neutrosophic MCDM method can be effectively used in 4PLs providers’ performance evaluation problems.