Extending QFD with Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets for Sustainable Supply Chain Management

Supply chain (SC) sustainability has gained vital importance in recent years. For sustainable SC management strategies (SSCM) of companies, environmental, social, and even technological issues should be considered with economic objectives. Business success cannot be measured solely with financial performance anymore, as other considerations are also critical for the long term achievements of companies. However, developing strategies for effective SSCM is challenging and complex. Here, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is one of the well-known methods for customer-focused design in SC, and fuzzy set theory has been widely used in QFD to manage and reduce the ambiguity in the decision process. Also recently, a new fuzzy logic approach based on the Pythagorean fuzzy set (PFS) has come forward. This paper designs an SSCM model by applying an extended QFD methodology based on PFS. In our knowledge, there exists no study in the literature that combines these approaches for SSCM. Finally, an illustrative application is given to verify the feasibility of the SSCM model. In addition, through this illustrative example, it is likely to see the advantage of using PFS in QFD to evaluate and aggregate the judgments in the decision-making process.