A Hybrid MCDM Approach for Large Group Green Supplier Selection With Uncertain Linguistic Information

Abstract

With increasing global concerns toward environmental protection and sustainable development, green supply chain management (GSCM) has drawn much attention from academicians and practitioners. Selecting an optimal green supplier is a critical part of GSCM, which can be viewed as a kind of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. To derive the best result, a large group of decision makers are often involved in the green supplier selection nowadays. Besides, decision makers tend to express their evaluations utilizing uncertain linguistic terms due to the vagueness of human thinking. Hence, this paper aims to propose a hybrid MCDM approach for green supplier selection within the large group setting. More concretely, interval-valued intuitionistic uncertain linguistic sets are applied for assessing the performance of green suppliers concerning each criterion. Ant colony algorithm is utilized to cluster decision makers into several subgroups. The linear programming technique for multidimensional analysis of preference is adopted for the determination of the optimal weights of criteria objectively. Finally, an extended MULTIMOORA approach is utilized to generate the ranking of alternative suppliers. The practicality and usefulness of the developed large group green supplier selection framework is illustrated using an empirical example of a real estate company.

Keywords

• Supply chain management
• green supplier selection
• ant colony algorithm
• interval-valued intuitionistic uncertain linguistic set
• MULTIMOORA method
• LINMAP approach