A Sustainable Manufacturing Strategy from Different Strategic Responses under Uncertainty

This paper presents a decision framework that highlights the integration of manufacturing strategy (MS) and sustainability along with strategic responses as a significant component. This integration raises complexity and uncertainty in decision-making following the number of subjective components with their inherent relationships that must be brought into context and the huge amount of required information in eliciting judgments. Thus, a proposed hybrid multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach in the form of an integrated probabilistic fuzzy analytic network process (PROFUZANP) is adopted in this work. In this method, analytic network process (ANP) serves as the main framework in identifying policy options of manufacturing strategy. Fuzzy set theory (FST) is used to describe vagueness in decision-making which is carried out by eliciting judgments in pairwise comparisons using linguistic variables with corresponding triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs). Probability theory is used to handle randomness in aggregating judgments of multiple decision-makers. Results show that a stakeholder-oriented approach is considered the most relevant strategic response in developing a sustainable manufacturing strategy. The contribution of this work lies in identifying the policies which constitute a sustainable manufacturing strategy using an integrated MCDM approach under uncertainty