Picture Fuzzy ARAS Method for Freight Distribution Concept Selection

Companies can perform their freight distribution in three different ways. The first concept, the in-house concept, represents the use of a company’s own resources and knowledge to organize transportation from the production to retailers or from the warehouse to customers. The opposite concept is to outsource distribution activities by hiring third-party logistics providers. The third concept represents a combination of the previous two. Although the arguments in favor of outsourcing can be found in the literature, an appropriate selection of a freight distribution concept is specific for each company and depends on many evaluation criteria and their symmetrical roles. This paper presents a methodology that can be used by companies that need to choose their freight distribution concept. An advanced extension of the Additive Ratio ASsessment (ARAS) method is developed to solve the freight distribution concept selection problem. To illustrate the implementation of the proposed methodology, a tire manufacturing company from the Czech Republic is taken as a case study. However, the proposed picture fuzzy ARAS method is general and can be used by any other company. To validate the novel picture fuzzy ARAS method, a comparative analysis with the nine existing state-of-the-art picture fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making methods is provided.