A multi-stage group decision making for strategic supplier selection based on prospect theory with interval-valued q-rung orthopair fuzzy linguistic sets

With the aggravation of market competition, strategic supplier is becoming more and more critical for the success of manufacturing enterprises. Suppler selection, being the critical and foremost activity must ensure that selected suppliers are capable of supporting the long-term development of organizations. Hence, strategic supplier selection must be restructures considering the long-term relationships and prospects for sustainable cooperation. This paper proposes a novel multi-stage multi-attribute group decision making method under an interval-valued q-rung orthopair fuzzy linguistic set (IVq-ROFLS) environment considering the decision makers' (DMs) psychological state in the group decision-making process. First, the initial comprehensive fuzzy evaluations of DMs are represented as IVq-ROFLS. Subsequently, two new operators are proposed for aggregating different stages and DMs' preferences respectively by extending generalized weighted averaging (GWA) to IVq-ROFLS context. Later, a new hamming distance based linear programming method based on entropy measure and score function is introduced to evaluate the unknown criteria weights. Additionally, the Euclidean distance is employed to compute the gain and loss matrix, and objects are prioritized by extending the popular Prospect theory (PT) method to the IVq-ROFLS context. Finally, the practical use of the proposed decision framework is validated by using a strategic supplier selection problem, as well as the effectiveness and applicability of the framework are discussed by using comparative analysis with other methods.