Evaluation and selection of third party logistics provider under sustainability perspectives: an interval valued fuzzy-rough approach

In today’s world, industries are facing massive pressure to integrate sustainability issues for efficient and successful supply chain management (SCM). Hence, worldwide it has become critically important to make economic operational balance satisfying environment protection norms and social welfare perspectives. Consequently, the industries are investigating their SCM structures in association with a third party logistics (3PL) service provider adopting the triple bottom line framework for improving the overall supply chain performance. Therefore, selection of the right 3PL provider for the sustainable alliance is supremely important for broader perspective of greater business value. Thus, the main objective of this research work is the selection of most appropriate 3PL provider for a food manufacturing company (FMC) after systematic evaluation of six different feasible logistic providers serving over a decade in India. Selection of optimal alternative 3PL provider is very complex and challenging because of the qualitative description of service provider performances and the inherent uncertainty due to subjectivity. The concept of interval-valued fuzzy-rough number (IVFRN) offers perfect treatment of such uncertainty. In this paper, we develop a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) model combining the factor relationship (FARE) and multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) models based on IVFRN. The proposed model is tested and validated on a case study where the optimal selection of 3PL providers is performed for an Indian FMC. Based on the results obtained in sensitivity analysis, it was shown that the proposed IVFRN based FARE-MABAC model produces stable/consistent solutions. Through the research presented in this paper, it is shown that the new hybrid MCDM method is a useful and reliable tool for rational decision-making.