Sustainable Raw Material Supplier Selection with Imprecise Information for Tire Production in the Context of Extended Producer Responsibility

This study constructs a ‘sustainable raw material supplier selection framework with imprecise information for tire production (SSSIITP)’ in the context of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) based on the existing “Z-Number Slacks-Based Measure (ZN-SBM) DEA model-based framework.” The SSSIITP framework selects sustainable raw material suppliers in the presence of imprecision in the available information by capturing its reliability degree by using Z-numbers. The suppliers are evaluated based on seven different raw materials required for tire production, namely “synthetic rubber,” “natural rubber,” “carbon black,” “steel,” “textile,” “zinc oxide” and “sulfur.” The SSSIITP framework is applied in a case study of sustainable raw material supplier selection for new tire production in Indian scenario. The findings indicate that the results of the SSSIITP framework are highly correlated with most of the state-of-the-art Z-number-based “multi-criteria decision making” methods. However, unlike these existing methods, the SSSIITP framework is free from the influence of the implicit biases of the decision-makers. This study offers a more reliable decision support tool for the tire producers to select sustainable raw material suppliers with imprecise information in the context of EPR.