Pharmaceutical 3PL supplier selection using interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy TOPSIS

Abstract

Third party logistics (3PL) supplier selection problem is a multi-criteria selection problem that is frequently discussed in the literature. Medicine is a fundamental element for human health and drug transportation must be carried out on time and under conditions that will ensure that the drug does not lose its physical properties. Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry is one of the foremost and most important sectors in 3PL. In this multi-criteria problem where the evaluation criteria are linguistic rather than numerical, vagueness and impreciseness in evaluations can only be handled with the help of fuzzy sets. With the help of intuitionistic fuzzy sets, one of the new extensions of fuzzy sets, the vagueness and impreciseness here will be discussed and the 3PL supplier selection problem will be tried to be solved with the TOPSIS method, which is one of the most used MCDM methods in the literature. The use of Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy sets will add more flexibility and accuracy to the assessment. Thus, the Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy TOPSIS method is used to solve the 3PL supplier selection problem and the robustness of the decisions taken is tested with a sensitivity analysis.