Supplier selection in the industry 4.0 era by using a fuzzy cognitive map and hesitant fuzzy linguistic VIKOR methodology.

Organizations will be increasingly concerned about maintaining their positions in today's changing world, the high-tech era, and the emergence of innovative technologies because of the industrial revolutions. Everyone has come to believe that to survive and continue their constructive roles, they must achieve competitive advantages by working based on the trends. It is undeniable that the introduction of Industry 4.0 has had a significant impact on enterprises, organizations, and, of course, supply chains. In the meantime, selecting a supplier is one of the main strategic decisions of the organization because choosing the right supplier leads to increasing profitability, improving market competition, better accountability, enhancing product quality, and reducing costs. While the issue of supplier evaluation has been one of the interesting topics for researchers in recent decades, its development in the fourth supply chain generation needs further consideration. In this regard, current technologies in the fourth-generation industrial revolution, methods, and criteria used in previous studies based on industry 4.0 and before that are reviewed separately. By reviewing previous articles and experts' opinions, thirteen sub-criteria considering industry 4.0 have been identified for selecting suppliers in three categories, economic, environmental, and social. The weight of each criterion has been determined using a set of fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) and considering the centrality of criteria in the concept of communication networks. To prioritize the suppliers, the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS) VIKOR method has been used in hesitant fuzzy linguistic terms. Finally, a case study is introduced to illustrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our integrated methodology and prioritize its four suppliers.

An Extension of the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis with Hesitant Fuzzy Sets to Assess the Occupational Hazards in the Construction Industry.

The construction industry is considered as one of the most dangerous industries in terms of occupational safety and has a high rate of occupational incidents and risks compared to other industries. Given the importance of identifying and assessing the occupational hazards in this industry, researchers have conducted numerous studies using statistical methods, multi-criteria decision-making methods, expert-based judgments, and so on. Although, these researchers have used linguistic variables, fuzzy sets and interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets to overcome challenges such as uncertainty and ambiguity in the risk assessment conducted by experts; the previous models lack in efficiency if the experts are hesitant in their assessment. This leads to the inability to assign a specific membership degree to any risk. Therefore, in this research, it is tried to provide an improved approach to the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) method using an Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) method based on the hesitant fuzzy set, which can effectively cope with the hesitance of the experts in the evaluation. Also, Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) method is applied for risk factor weighing in the proposed approach. This model is applied to a construction industry case study to solve a realistic occupational risk assessment. Moreover, a comparison is made between the results of this model and those obtained by the conventional FMEA and some other aggregation operators. The results indicate that the newly developed approach is useful and flexible to address complex FMEA problems and can generate logical and reliable priority rankings for failure modes.