A new multi-criteria approach dealing with dependent and heterogeneous criteria for end-of-life product strategy

Strict regulations, technological growth and environmental impacts are influent factors in the choice of the best strategy for end-of-life (EOL) product. In fact, EOL is one stage of the life cycle having gained the attention of the market. This study proposes an integrated methodology that relies on multi-criteria analysis and takes into account both quantitative and qualitative criteria while respecting mutual interactions between them. This has been performed by introducing, on the one hand, the 2-tuple linguistic representation model dealing with non-homogeneous information data, and on the other hand, the Choquet integral interaction modeling between criteria into the PROMETHEE method. Although it has been developed for EOL selection problems, the proposed method fits to all kinds of decision-making problems with heterogeneous information. As this work demonstrates, this multi-criteria analysis approach can offer a technical-scientific decision making support tool in the EOL product sector. We also perform a sensitivity to reveal the effect of the subjective parameter variations on the originally resulted ranking. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.