Track: Decision Sciences

Abstract

The advancing technology and innovations change the world rapidly. Both countries and companies need to make fast and effective decisions to keep up with the changing conditions and make our world sustainable. Accordingly, this study aims to present a Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Term Sets (HFLTS) based Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)-Additive Ratio ASsessment (ARAS) methodology for assessment of sustainability action areas. HFLTS is applied to propose experts’ assessments by addressing the difficulty of expressing opinions by uncertainty. This technique provides flexibility by eliciting comparative linguistics expressions, resulting in an assessment environment closer to human thinking. The combined AHP-ARAS methodology offers many benefits such as ease of use for applying, the ability to overcome complex situations, the simplicity with which it may be extended to diverse fuzzy environments, flexibility, checking the consistency of decision-making. Plus, it considers the criteria's hierarchical structure and provides a direct and proportional relationship with the criteria weights. The criteria, consisting of sustainability action areas, are weighted with the Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic (HFL) AHP method. Then, industries such as chemical, information technology, food production, apparel, etc. are evaluated with the HFL ARAS method. To illustrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology, an illustrative study is also provided. The results of this paper showed that the most appropriate criterion is “Increasing resource efficiency” and the first ranked industry is  “Chemical Industry ”.