Sustainability evaluation via variable precision rough set approach: A photovoltaic module supplier case study

Sustainable development has gained much attention from various organizations. To improve competitiveness, enterprises often consider sustainability in their supply chain management (SCM) process. One of the critical issues in sustainable SCM is supplier selection and evaluation. However, accurate judgment is difficult to be made for decision makers due to the subjective and vague information in the process of supplier evaluation. Although fuzzy-based methods are developed to deal with the subjectivity and vagueness, they need priori information. Moreover, the influence of decision makers’ bounded rationality on evaluation is often omitted in the uncertain environment. To deal with the problems, a novel approach integrating rough set theory and TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of Interactive and Multicriteria Decision Making) method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method integrates the strength of rough set theory in flexibly handling vagueness, and the advantage of TODIM method in manipulating bounded rationality. Lastly, the proposed method is applied into a case study about evaluating sustainability of photovoltaic module suppliers, to verify the feasibility and usefulness of the method.