Assessing and Selecting Sustainable Suppliers in Intuitionistic Fuzzy Set with Hybrid Multi-Criteria Best-Worst and VIKOR Approach

A sustainable supply of raw materials has a concern for manufacturing companies. Due to the increase of environmental and social awareness, selecting a sustainable supplier has been one of the priorities of organizations. The ambiguity and uncertainty in decision making have led to the application of decision-making methods in uncertainty situations. The present study intends to use a fuzzy multi-criteria hybrid approach to provide a decision model for evaluating and selecting sustainable suppliers. For this purpose, in the first step, by reviewing previous researches, effective indicators of selecting sustainable suppliers have been considered then using Fuzzy Delphi method, the indicators were screened from the viewpoint of experts. In the next step, with the help of the intuitionistic fuzzy best worst method, the weight of each indicator was extracted. In the following, the intuitionistic fuzzy VIKOR approach was used to evaluate existing suppliers. In order to verify the capability of the proposed model, a real study was conducted in the lead-acid batteries production industry. Finally, by analyzing the sensitivity and comparing the results of the model with the intuitionistic fuzzy TOPSIS approach, the efficiency of the proposed approach was evaluated.