Green Supplier Selection With a Continuous Interval-Valued Linguistic TODIM Method

Abstract

TODIM method (an acronym in Portuguese of Interactive and Multicriteria Decision Making) has attracted the attention of many scholars and achieved much success in multi-criteria decision making. Linguistic expression, as a qualitative information representation form, is much closer to human's cognition than specific numerical values. This paper combines the classical TODIM method with the continuous interval-valued linguistic term set to solve multi-criteria group decision-making problems. A distance measure of the continuous interval-valued linguistic term set is developed and then applied to develop a criteria-weighting method. In addition, the consensus level among experts are taken into account and an improved consensus reaching method is introduced to help experts reach an agreement. Subsequently, the framework of the continuous interval-valued linguistic TODIM method is introduced to show how to derive the optimal decision-making result with complicated and precise linguistic assessments in the qualitative situation. A case study concerning the green supplier selection for a food company is provided to verify the feasibility and practicality of the proposed method. Finally, the comparisons with other ranking methods are provided to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.

Keywords

• Multi-criteria decision making
• continuous interval-valued linguistic term set
• TODIM method
• distance measure
• group decision making
• green supplier