An Integrated Content Validity Ratio, Fuzzy Best–Worst Method and Fuzzy Additive Ratio Assessment Framework for Sustainable Transportation Service Provider Selection

The selection of transportation service providers (TSPs) is a strategically critical decision in sustainable supply chain management. However, existing decision-making frameworks exhibit three recurring limitations: the absence of formally validated, sector-specific sustainability criteria; reliance on weighting methods that inadequately handle expert judgment uncertainty; and limited application to emerging market contexts, particularly export-oriented garment and textile industries facing growing environmental, social, and traceability pressures from global buyers. To address these gaps, this study develops and validates an integrated multi-criteria decision-making framework combining Content Validity Ratio CVR analysis, the Fuzzy Best–Worst Method (FBWM), and Fuzzy Additive Ratio Assessment (FARAS). CVR analysis was applied to an initial pool of 28 candidate criteria, retaining 22 validated criteria spanning economic, environmental, social, and operational dimensions. FBWM was subsequently used to derive criterion weights from nine decision-makers (DMs) representing garment manufacturers, transportation providers, and academia in Vietnam, while FARAS ranked five candidate TSPs. Results indicate that operational and economic criteria are the most influential dimensions, while cost for the service, financial performance, industry experience, environmental awareness, and environmental legal and policy framework emerge as the five highest-weighted sub-criteria. The final ranking order, TSP2 > TSP4 > TSP5 > TSP1 > TSP3, remained stable across benchmarking with FTOPSIS, FVIKOR, and FMOORA, as well as underweight perturbation and equal-weighting scenarios, confirming the robustness of the ranking results.