A Time-Dependent Sustainable–Flexible Supplier Selection Considering Uncertainty and TODIM Method in Iranian Dairy Industries

Nowadays, by increasing awareness on environmental and social responsibilities, stakeholders and people put more pressure on the enterprises and companies to respect these issues. Owing to the fact that suppliers as the upstream of the supply chain play an important role in success and prosperity, the sustainability of suppliers would be a must and enterprises need to create and utilize an integrated assessment model based on related criteria in every specific industry. However, these sustainability and environmental criteria especially would be critical in the cold chain and dairy industries; to our knowledge, there are not enough surveys related to this category. Interval triangular fuzzy numbers have been utilized to overcome uncertainty of the linguistic notions of the experts in this area. As criterion’s weight and even its matter would be changed during the time horizon, fuzzy time function would be applied to illustrate these modifications during the time. For solving our integrated sustainable–flexible multi-criteria model, we take advantage of TODIM, a discrete multi-criteria method based on prospect theory in uncertainty which includes gain and loss of decision simultaneously. Finally, managerial insight and associated sensitivity analysis of the ability and robustness of the proposed decision framework have been illustrated in the small- and medium-scale dairy industries in Iran.