Strategy selection for sustainable manufacturing with integrated AHP-VIKOR method under interval-valued fuzzy environment

Abstract

Selection of an appropriate sustainability strategy is a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem for manufacturing organizations due to incommensurate and conflicting evaluation criteria. In addition, incomplete information and different opinions of decision makers lead to uncertainties such as interval data and fuzziness. This study proposes a hierarchal MCDM method by combining Analytical Hierarchal Process (AHP) and VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (VIKOR) methods under interval-valued fuzzy environment to deal with ranking of sustainable manufacturing strategies. Linguistic variables were used to assess the ratings of strategies and weights for selection criteria. These linguistic variables were expressed in the triangular interval-valued fuzzy sets. Using a case study of manufacturing small and medium enterprise, the final ranking of the strategies was elicited in accordance with this procedure. Subsequently, a sensitivity analysis was performed to validate the stability of the proposed final ranking. This method can be used as a decision making tool for alternative or strategy selection in other areas where uncertainties are inherent.