Sustainable recycling partner selection using fuzzy DEMATEL-AEW-FVIKOR: A case study in small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs)

The requirement and policy of eco-economy motivate enterprises to achieve sustainability by implementing sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). In contrast to the large amount of literature focusing on green design and green production practices, this paper pays close attention to the sustainable management practice at the bottom of the supply chain by researching sustainable recycling partner evaluation from the economic, environmental and social perspectives. To develop a feasible analytical framework for recycling partner selection, the fuzzy-based technology is applied to cope with the vague, uncertain and qualitative information. A novel integrated MCDM “fuzzy DEMATEL-AEW-FVIKOR” approach is developed to choose a best recycling partner for small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs). The combined weighting technique integrating subjective weight based on fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEDL) method with objective weight based on anti-entropy weighting (AEW) has been coupled with the fuzzy VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (FVIKOR) operations to choose the best candidate. To investigate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method, a case application has been conducted in a SME. Meanwhile, the sensitivity analysis of the method is also detected. The results argue that the best selected partner alternative keeps a high conformance with Shemshadi's and Chaghooshi's methods, and it demonstrates a strong robustness when v and φ parameters fluctuate. Besides, the proposed hybrid fuzzy DEMATEL-AEW-FVIKOR method shows its advantage in flexibility concerning the decision makers' preference.