Green-resilient supplier selection via a new integrated rough multi-criteria framework

Abstract

Initially, companies focused solely on the economic aspects of business processes; now, they have begun to prioritize environmental and social issues to mitigate adverse impacts on the ecology and community. Furthermore, resilience is crucial in ensuring the supply chain remains uninterrupted. Therefore, evaluating the suppliers' sustainability and resilience performance is paramount. A unique mathematical tool is required to integrate resilience and sustainability considerations into supplier selection decisions. Hence, the research fulfills this necessity by introducing a novel, multi-criteria rough methodology. The studies in the literature primarily assess suppliers from either a green or resilient perspective, employing fuzzy MCDM methods to address uncertainty. However, they struggle to cope with uncertainty when faced with limited information. To address this gap, this study proposes a novel approach based on rough set theory to handle interpersonal ambiguity and vagueness flexibly without requiring additional information. It determines the weights of criteria used for green-resilient supplier selection and evaluates the green-resilient performance of suppliers. To this end, rough logarithmic percentage change-driven objective weighting and rough maximum of criterion frameworks are developed to determine criteria weights, whereas the rough mixed aggregation by the comprehensive normalization technique model is designed to decide alternative rankings. This approach requires less prior information than fuzzy set-based methodologies and offers additional flexibility in handling imprecision. To demonstrate its practicality, a real case study from a garment-textile factory in Turkey is presented. The work is the first study of this issue to employ the introduced methodology. Findings highlight that the impact on the local community is the foremost driver for green-resilient supplier selection, followed by cost and supplier sustainability. The model's reliability is validated by comparative and sensitivity analysis. The research contributes to the field by providing a reliable tool that combines rough sets with resilience and sustainability approaches, thus improving the effectiveness and credibility of supplier selection activities in engineering. The work provides executives with an effective supplier evaluation process that jointly addresses sustainability and resilience assessments under uncertainty.