A Group Decision-Making Approach Based on HFL MCDM Methods: Sustainable Supplier Selection

Selecting a supplier is a common Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) problem; however, choosing a sustainable supplier involves considering economic, environmental, and social factors simultaneously. Therefore, selecting the most suitable supplier gains more importance, especially for businesses that adopt the understanding of sustainability in their supply chain processes. This study aims to provide a Group Decision-Making (GDM) approach based on Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic (HFL) MCDM methods to select the most sustainable supplier. The literature, industry reports, and expert comments provide a sustainable supplier selection methodology in this setting. The HFL technique addresses expert opinions' reluctance and uncertainty, and the assessment process's partiality is addressed by a GDM approach using aggregation operators. The impacts of the evaluation factors are identified using the HFL Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) approach. The HFL Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS) method evaluates sustainable suppliers. To demonstrate the potential of the suggested method, an application of this MCDM problem is given. Lastly, the application results and outlook for the future are provided.