A sustainable supply chain (SSC) is vital for company’s sustainability success, so it is imperative to identify and prioritize SSC’s design requirements (DRs) for better SSC planning. For customer-centric markets, the customer requirements (CRs) need to be integrated into SSC’s DRs. This paper thus proposes a customer-centric approach based on Analytic Network Process (ANP), Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Grey Relational Analysis (GRA), and Pythagorean Fuzzy Set (PFS) to rank SSC’s DRs, considering CRs and information ambiguity. The PFS is combined with ANP, QFD, and GRA to better handle uncertainty in the SSC. The Pythagorean fuzzy ANP is applied to analyze the correlations among the sustainable CRs and determine the corresponding weights. The sustainable CRs are transformed into the DRs using the Pythagorean fuzzy QFD. The relationships among the resulting DRs are analyzed through Pythagorean fuzzy GRA to prioritize DRs. The approach is validated through a case study. The results obtained in this paper shows that the proposed method is efficient to prioritize DRs of SSC with the consideration of sustainable CRs under uncertain environment. The novelties of proposed method are that it not only offers a customer-oriented SSC planning method through the integration of ANP, QFD and GRA, but also can reflect the uncertain information with a broader membership representation space via PFSs. Based on the proposed method, the decision-maker can conduct comprehensive analysis to prioritize DRs and design appropriate SSC to fulfill CRs under uncertain environment.

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to develop a hybrid method to prioritize risk factors (RFs) of sustainable supply chain (SSC) considering sustainable customer requirements (CRs) and uncertain evaluation.Design/methodology/approachIn the proposed method, fuzzy Kano model (FKM) is applied to prioritize sustainable CRs considering customer satisfaction (CS) and objective weight of each CR, the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (IVIF) set theory is integrated with quality function deployment (QFD) to translate the sustainable CRs into RFs of SSC under uncertain environment and the IVIF cross-entropy is used to conduct objective analysis to prioritize RFs. Finally, a case in air-conditioner-manufacturing company is presented to demonstrate the proposed method.FindingsA case study of SSC risk management, the comparative analysis and associated discussions are conducted to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results obtained from the case study shows that RF5 (market share reduction) is the most important RF in the SSC. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed method can integrate sustainable CRs into SSC's RFs, handle uncertain information effectively and obtain objective importance of RFs.Originality/valueTheoretically, the paper develops a customer-oriented model based on the FKM, QFD, IVIF sets and entropy theory to prioritize RFs of SSC under uncertain environment. The model enables to integrate sustainable CRs into RFs managements and is efficient to deal with the subjectivity and conduct objective analysis to prioritize RFs. In practice, the systematic and correct RFs' priorities analysis provides reliable decision support for the managers to take measures to avoid or mitigate the critical RFs.

On the basis of the calculated mould temperature, a three-dimensional thermal stress model of the mould is established. A corresponding finite element method program is developed with six-face and eight-node isoparameter elements. The Newton method is used to solve the stress equations. Making using of the stress model, the thermal distortion and stress distribution of the mould are obtained when the thickness of the mould wall is different. Experimental data have been used to validate the model. From the result, it is proved that the mould stress is less than its yield strength and does not result does in residual deformation.

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