Ranking Sustainable Projects through an Innovative Hybrid DEMATEL-VIKOR Decision-Making Approach Using Z-Number

According to the heavy reliance of economic growth on environmental and social matters, sustainable development has turned into one of the main strategies of the organizations associated with selecting the project basket. Moreover, market conditions, rapid global changes in several aspects, uncertainty in intellectual judgments of the experts, and many other factors have increased uncertainty in problems of this kind. Accordingly, the main objective of this paper is to develop a mixed decision-making approach (DEMATEL-VIKOR) with the aim of ranking and evaluating suggested projects considering sustainability indices in a “mass production and infrastructural” company under uncertainty, while also taking reliability (Z-number information) into account. Given the existing uncertainty in the opinions of experts and previous data, fuzzy approach and Z-number information have been employed for weighting the filtered sustainability indices that are aligned with the objectives of the considered company (Z-DEMATEL), as well as ranking candidate projects (Z-VIKOR), which contribute to the main innovation of the present research. In addition, for scoring in the Z-number state, a novel definition of linguistic variable (fuzzy linguistic variable considering probabilities) has been put forward. The suggested approach was solved by an expert in two numerical examples in three certain, fuzzy, and Z-number scenarios, the results of which show that different results are obtained for different scenarios. Apart from that, given that Z-number takes the probability of reliance on the opinions of experts into consideration, the more the approach moves from being certain towards the fuzzy state and the Z-number state, the more the results approach the real world, hence yielding more reliable results. Therefore, results obtained from the proposed Z-DEMATEL-VIKOR approach are far more reliable. Moreover, significance weights in the Z-number scenario are 39%, 26%, and 36% in the economic, social, and environmental dimensions, respectively, which is indicative of the importance of social and environmental aspects apart from the economic dimension.

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