A Hybrid Approach Based on Consensus Decision Making for Green Supplier Selection in Automotive Industry

Abstract

With increased global commerce, businesses must manage their supply chains while taking into account not only costs but also environmental implications. The decision-making of Green Supplier Selection (GSS) is a strategic priority for companies to survive in challenging market conditions and to effectively and sustainably manage their supply chains in the increasingly polluted and resource-depleted world. Environmental sustainability can be enhanced with the appropriate criteria when choosing green suppliers. Based on these motivations, it is necessary to determine the correct criteria, classify the chosen criteria and employ an effective evaluation method in the GSS process. In particular, evaluating each criterion at its own level is of strategic importance. In this paper, the GSS model, handled by group decision-making, is constructed with multi-sub-criteria to increase the competitive advantage of businesses in challenging market conditions for the purpose of ensuring a sustainable future. A novel hybrid methodology of the Interval Type-2 Fuzzy (IT2F) Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and IT2F Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is presented for the GSS model to deal with uncertainty. This study provides decision-makers with an effective method that performs fuzzy calculations at all steps until a solution is found, especially in areas that may have a complex hierarchical structure, such as the automotive industry. In the proposed method, unlike most studies in the literature, if a criterion has sub-criteria (or multi-sub-criteria) in the hierarchy considered, each criterion is evaluated with other criteria at its own level, without the need for all other criteria to have sub-criteria (or multi-sub-criteria). The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated by testing it with an application taken from the automotive industry with a complex-structured multi-level hierarchy. Additionally, sensitivity analysis has been conducted to assess the impact of changes in subjective input by means of scenarios.