A q-rung orthopair fuzzy combined compromise solution approach for selecting sustainable third-party reverse logistics provider

PurposeReverse logistics (RL) is a type of supply chain management that moves goods from the end customer to the original manufacturer for reuse, remanufacturing and disposal purposes. Owing to growing environmental legislations and the development of new technologies in marketing, RL has attracted more significance among experts and academicians. Outsourcing RL practices to third-party reverse logistics provider (3PRLP) has been identified as one of the most important management strategies due to complexity of RL operations and the lack of available resource. Current sustainability trends have made 3PRLP assessment and selection process more complex. In order to select the 3PRLP, the existence of several aspects of sustainability motivates the experts to establish a new multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach.Design/methodology/approachWith the growing complexity and high uncertainty of decision environments, the preference values of 3PRLPs are not always expressed with real numbers. As the generalized version of fuzzy set, intuitionistic fuzzy set and Fermatean fuzzy set, the theory of q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (q-ROFS) is used to permit decision experts (DEs) to their assessments in a larger space and to better cope with uncertain information. Given that the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) is an innovative MCDA approach with higher degree of stability and reliability than several existing methods.FindingsTo exhibit the potentiality and applicability of the presented framework, a case study of S3PRLPs assessment is taken from q-rung orthopair fuzzy perspective. The assessment process consists of three sustainability aspects namely economic, environment and social dimensions related with a total of 14 criteria. Further, sensitivity and comparative analyses are made to display the solidity and strength of the presented approach. The results of this study approve that the presented methodology is more stable and efficient in comparison with other methods.Originality/valueThus, the objective of the study is to develop a hybrid decision-making methodology by combining CoCoSo method and discrimination measure with q-ROFS for selecting an appropriate sustainable 3PRLP (S3PRLP) candidate under uncertain environment. In the proposed method, a novel procedure is proposed to obtain the weights of DEs within q-ROFS context. To calculate the criteria weights, a new formula is presented based on discrimination measure, which provides more realistic weights. In this respect, a new discrimination measure is proposed for q-ROFSs.