Group decision making method for third-party logistics management: An interval rough cloud optimization model

Group decision making in third-party logistics service selection plays an essential role for improving service quality, increasing efficiency and reducing the net cost. Fuzzy and uncertain linguistic variables are commonly used to represent experts‘rankings in optimization problems. To recognize the limits of human cognition and subjectivity of human evaluations, several optimization approaches have been studied to select remanufacturing alternatives in decision making processes, however these methods have certain deficiencies such as lacking manipulation tools of diverse information, randomness, use of predefined parameters increasing uncertainty, interpersonal relations among evaluation criteria. The integration of interval numbers, rough approximations, and cloud model theory plays a significant role to model incomplete and inadequate information occurring in decision making problems. This research paper focuses on the integration of dual interval rough integrated cloud model with best-worst optimization technique, Multi-Attributive Border Approximation area Comparison (MABAC) and Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) approaches. A novel min–max optimization model based dual interval rough integrated cloud values is designed to compute the weight coefficients and consistency ratio for each criteria. The consistency of proposed optimization model is checked using a consistency ratio test. Secondly, the alternatives are ranked using the proposed DIRI cloud based MABAC and WASPAS approaches using interval clouds based weighted sum and weighted product coefficients, approximation area values and distance formulae. The significance of the proposed model is highlighted with a case study of third-party logistics service management of an electronic firm. The rationality and out-performance of the proposed methodology is studied by a comparative analysis with existing approaches and detailed sensitivity analysis on different variations of criteria weights and parameter.