Sustainable-supplier selection for manufacturing services: a failure mode and effects analysis model based on interval-valued fuzzy group decision-making

Inside supply chains’ exercises, evaluating suitable suppliers in light of the sustainability criteria, including economic, environmental, and social, can assist organizations to move toward sustainable development by considering their risks. Evaluating and choosing the sustainable-supplier for manufacturing services with lowest risks among candidates in the sustainable-supply chain management (S-SCM) is a vital issue for logistics managers, particularly by considering different sustainable criteria via three dimensions of the sustainability for strategic decisions. This paper introduces a new failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) model based on multi-criteria decision-making by a group of supply chain-experts with interval-valued fuzzy (IVF) setting and asymmetric uncertainty information concurrently. In fact, the proposed model evaluates and ranks the suppliers according to their risks of economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Concepts of mean, variance, and skewness are introduced into the proposed FMEA model, and their mathematical relations are presented based on fuzzy possibilistic statistical concepts. Then, new definitions in the FMEA are presented for obtaining ideal solutions under uncertain conditions with possibilisic mean and possibilistic standard deviation, along with the possibilisic cube-root of skewness. Also, novel separation measures, max- and min-indices, and new fuzzy ranking index for risk scoring are presented to provide order of sustainable-supplier candidates under risky conditions. Finally, a real case study for manufacturing services is given and solved by the proposed FMEA model to demonstrate its capability in the S-SCM environment. The results of the proposed model illustrate that sustainable suppliers have been assessed and selected with the least amount of risks according to three dimensions of the sustainability.