Addressing Environmental Protection Supplier Selection Issues in a Fuzzy Information Environment Using a Novel Soft Fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS Method

Abstract

With the current heightened promotion of environmental awareness, issues related to environmental protection have become a critical component of economic development. The emergence of new environment-friendly materials and simple packaging, and other environmental awareness demands in recent years, have prompted manufacturers to pay more attention to planning greener production and supply processes than before. Many scholars have been urged to investigate the issues related to environmental protection and the sustainable economy of green suppliers. However, many factors needed to be considered, such as the price, cost, benefit, reputation, and quality involved in the process of green supplier selection. These factors require quantitative and qualitative analysis information, making the issue of environmental protection a multi-criteria decision making (MDCM) problem. Traditional research methods are unable to effectively and objectively handle the MCDM problem of green supplier selection due to the problem’s complexity and the method’s inclination towards biased conclusions. To resolve the complicated problem of green supplier selection, this study combined the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), and the 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic model (2-tuple FLM) and corrected the ranking of the possible green suppliers. The computation results were also compared with the typical TOPSIS and AHP–TOPSIS methods. Through the numerical verification of the actual case for the green supplier, the test results suggested that the proposed method could perform an objective evaluation of expert-provided information while also retaining all their valuable insights.