Extending Quality Function Deployment and Analytic Hierarchy Process under Interval-Valued Fuzzy Environment for Evaluating Port Sustainability

Abstract

To confront the related problems of environmental protection, energy saving, and carbon reduction, sustainability has been a prominent issue for enterprises seeking to meet the requirements of the Earth Summit’ sustainable development goals (SDGs). Basically, sustainability evaluation of enterprises must be considered from environmental, social, and economic perspectives, recognized as quality requirements. Numerous enterprises, especially for international ports, must pay attention to these requirements in expressing their corporate social responsibility (CSR) for decreasing marine pollution. Practically, the three requirements may be dependent under uncertain environments, and rationally evaluated by fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (FMCDM) with dependent evaluation criteria (DEC). In other words, evaluating port sustainability, containing location expanding, should belong to FMCDM with DEC. For DEC under uncertain environments, fuzzy extension of the analytic network process (ANP) is a feasible solution to solve the above problems. However, fuzzy computations of ANP are heavily complicated; thus, we desire to combine quality function deployment (QFD) with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) under the interval-valued fuzzy environment (IVFE) into a hybrid method for evaluating port sustainability. In numerous multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) efforts, AHP was often extended into FMCDM to encompass the imprecision and vagueness of data, but the extension was properly used for FMCDM with independent evaluation criteria (IDEC). Herein, QFD is utilized to express the dependent relationships between criteria, and thus transforms IDEC into DEC for the evaluation of port sustainability. Through the hybrid method, QFD is combined with AHP to replace ANP under IVFE, the complicated ties of ANP-corresponding interval-valued fuzzy numbers (IVFNs) are overcome, and the problem of evaluating port sustainability is rationally solved.