TY - JOUR
T1 - Sustainable transport fleet appraisal using a hybrid multi-objective decision making approach
AU - Bai, Chunguang
AU - Fahimnia, Behnam
AU - Sarkis, Joseph
PY - 2015/10/1
Y1 - 2015/10/1
N2 - One of the most critical operational practices influencing the environmental sustainability of organizations and their supply chains is the transport of materials, products and people. The carbon footprints, materials depletion, and general pollution emissions from transport vehicles makes their environmental burdens significant. Thus, identifying, selecting and implementing more environmentally conscious transportation vehicles can be of paramount importance for the development and management of greener supply chains. Given the relative importance of this issue, it is surprising that research on transport fleet evaluation, especially from an environmental sustainability perspective, has been rather limited. A primary challenge in this context is the broad range of influencing factors that need to be considered, many of which are not fully and easily measurable. This paper aims to (1) develop a holistic framework for sustainable transport fleet appraisal incorporating various vehicle performance, economic and environmental criteria, (2) introduce a novel hybrid approach for sustainable transportation vehicle evaluation and selection by combining a three-parameter interval grey number with a rough set theory and VIKOR method, (3) investigate the application of the proposed approach in a case example where empirical data is collected from industry experts, (4) evaluate the robustness of the methodology through sensitivity analysis experiments, and (5) provide practical insights and directions for future research in this area.
AB - One of the most critical operational practices influencing the environmental sustainability of organizations and their supply chains is the transport of materials, products and people. The carbon footprints, materials depletion, and general pollution emissions from transport vehicles makes their environmental burdens significant. Thus, identifying, selecting and implementing more environmentally conscious transportation vehicles can be of paramount importance for the development and management of greener supply chains. Given the relative importance of this issue, it is surprising that research on transport fleet evaluation, especially from an environmental sustainability perspective, has been rather limited. A primary challenge in this context is the broad range of influencing factors that need to be considered, many of which are not fully and easily measurable. This paper aims to (1) develop a holistic framework for sustainable transport fleet appraisal incorporating various vehicle performance, economic and environmental criteria, (2) introduce a novel hybrid approach for sustainable transportation vehicle evaluation and selection by combining a three-parameter interval grey number with a rough set theory and VIKOR method, (3) investigate the application of the proposed approach in a case example where empirical data is collected from industry experts, (4) evaluate the robustness of the methodology through sensitivity analysis experiments, and (5) provide practical insights and directions for future research in this area.
KW - 512 Business and Management
KW - Transport fleet evaluation
KW - Transportation vehicle
KW - Environmental sustainability
KW - Grey numbers
KW - Rough set theory
KW - VIKOR
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84944555803&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10479-015-2009-z
DO - 10.1007/s10479-015-2009-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84944555803
SN - 0254-5330
VL - 250
SP - 309
EP - 340
JO - Annals of Operations Research
JF - Annals of Operations Research
IS - 2
ER -