Assessing sustainability in supply chain using dempster-shafer theory

Abstract

Sustainability assessment in supply chain is an important task for any organization in the competitive business environment. To ensure better decisions for optimizing the sustainability attributes such assessments are desirable. Therefore, it is essential to have a model of sustainability assessment in supply chain considering the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social attributes, as failure of these attributes may lead to catastrophic consequences. The sustainability assessment process of an organization is aligned with different sources of information which can be uncertain, incomplete, and subjective in nature. To assess or monitor the sustainability, though there are many techniques available, but the intelligent interpretation of the collected information remains a challenge. Therefore, this research proposes a methodology that uses an integrated approach of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Hierarchical Evidential Reasoning (HER) based on Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory to develop a supply chain sustainability assessment model. After identifying the sustainability assessment criteria, AHP is used to structure and rate the criteria based on expert’s opinion. In this research, subjective judgmental belief data have been used to test the model. The information is combined using D-S theory and results are depicted as supply chain sustainability index. In the proposed model, the results of D-S theory are compared using Yager’s recursive rule of combination. The model generates satisfactory results based on the utilized data.