Environmental considerations in the selection of transport vehicles: a fuzzy FUCOM method

Purpose Businesses are starting to prioritize environmental concerns more when conducting their operations due to increasing awareness of environmental degradation and legal obligations. Thus, companies must take into account a variety of factors when buying the equipment that they need to carry out their operations. More importantly, these factors need to be properly considered because buying a vehicle is a costly decision. Design/methodology/approach The study was conducted in a logistics company operating in Ankara. The data collected were obtained from five experts working as senior managers in this logistics company using an e-mail survey method, one of the modern survey types. In the study, a mixed decision-making approach based on subjective criteria expressed linguistically in an environment of uncertainty was adopted, and fuzzy full consistency method (F-FUCOM) was used to prioritize criteria by integrating environmental factors into the criteria that logistics companies take into account when selecting transportation vehicles. In total, 4 main and 17 sub-criteria were evaluated according to the decision-makers' perspectives. Findings The study’s result shows that the main criterion with the highest importance was environmental, while the main criterion with the lowest importance was cost. Furthermore, vehicle life was found to be the most important sub-criterion, which is one of the environmental main criteria, while the vehicle’s net weight was found to be the least important sub-criterion, which is one of the equipment main criteria. Originality/value The role of environmental criteria and multi-criteria decision-making approaches in transportation vehicle selection remains underexplored in the literature. Moreover, the F-FUCOM approach has not been applied to such complex problems. This study addresses these gaps by incorporating environmental factors into a comprehensive methodological framework, advancing both theory and practice in the field.