New Integrated Quality Function Deployment Approach Based on Interval Neutrosophic Set for Green Supplier Evaluation and Selection

Green supplier evaluation and selection plays a crucial role in the green supply chain management of any organization to reduce the purchasing cost of materials and increase the flexibility and quality of products. An interval neutrosophic set (INS)-which is a generalization of fuzzy sets, intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) and neutrosophic sets (NS)-can better handle the incomplete, indeterminate and inconsistent information than the other sets. This paper proposes a new integrated Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in support of the green supplier evaluation and selection process. In the proposed approach, INS is used to assess the relative importance of the characteristics that the purchased product should have (internal variables "WHATs") in order to satisfy the company's needs, the relevant supplier assessment criteria (external variables "HOWs"), the "HOWs"-"WHATs" correlation scores, the resulting weights of the "HOWs" and the impact of each potential supplier. The normalized weighted rating is then defined and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is developed to obtain a final ranking of green suppliers. A case study is applied to demonstrate the efficiency and computational procedure of the proposed method.