Hesitant Trapezoidal Fuzzy QUALIFLEX Method and Its Application in the Evaluation of Green Supply Chain Initiatives

This paper explores how to handle multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems in which the criteria values of alternatives take the form of comparative linguistic expressions. Firstly, the new concept of hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (HTrFNs) is provided to model the semantics of the comparative linguistic expressions. Then, the operational laws and the distance measures of HTrFNs are presented. Afterwards, a useful outranking method, the hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy QUALIFLEX method, is developed to handle the MCDM problems with hierarchical structure in the environment of HTrFN. At length, the proposed method is applied to evaluating green supply chain initiatives in order to achieve sustainable economic and environmental performance, and a case study concerned with a fashion retail chain is presented to demonstrate its feasibility and applicability, also, a comparative analysis with other relevant approaches is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.