Evaluating Green Supply Chain Management Practices Under Fuzzy Environment: A Novel Method Based on D Number Theory

Abstract

The evaluation of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices is a typical multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. Considering widely existed uncertainty, evaluating GSCM practices in a fuzzy environment becomes a fuzzy MCDM issue. Traditional fuzzy MCDM approaches solve the issue usually through fusing the fuzzy assessments on different criteria for each alternative. In the process, the fuzzy uncertainty of every assessment has been given much attention; however, the non-exclusiveness between fuzzy linguistic variables is often ignored especially when combining the fuzzy assessments. In this paper, the non-exclusiveness between fuzzy assessments represented by linguistic variables is fully taken into consideration. A theory called D number theory, as an extension of Dempster–Shafer theory, is used to deal with this non-exclusiveness. Based on D number theory, a novel method is proposed to evaluate GSCM practices in the fuzzy environment. The main contribution and advantage of the proposed method is being able to simultaneously cope with fuzziness, ambiguity, and non-exclusiveness involved in the process of evaluating GSCM practices. A numerical example and related analysis are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.