An integrated ANP-VIKOR methodology for sustainable supplier selection with interval type-2 fuzzy sets

Recently, sustainable supplier chain management (SSCM) has gained increasing attentions both from corporate and academic. A large number of multiple criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) methods for sustainable supplier selection have been developed. In this paper, considering that the interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs) exhibit some interesting properties for handling uncertain information and high order imprecision, we integrate the ANP (analytical network process) method and the VIKOR (ViseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) method under interval type-2 fuzzy environment to solve supplier selection problem in SSCM. The proposed method consists of two steps. First, we obtain the weights of criteria via the ANP method. Then, based on the weights of criteria presented in step 1, a compromise solution will be proposed with the aid of VIKOR method. A numerical example is presented to show the decision process in detail. In addition, a comparative analysis with interval type-2 fuzzy ANP method and TOPSIS method is also presented to verify the validity of the proposed method.