A New Multi-Criteria Approach for Sustainable Material Selection Problem

Renan Felinto de Farias Aires () and Luciano Ferreira
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Renan Felinto de Farias Aires: Department of Applied Social Sciences, Federal Rural University of the Semi-Arid, Mossoró CEP 59625-900, RN, Brazil
Luciano Ferreira: Management School, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre CEP 90010-460, RS, Brazil

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 18, 1-20

Abstract: Sustainable material selection is a crucial problem given the new demands of society and novel production strategies that consider the concepts of sustainability. Multi-criteria decision-making methods have been extensively used to help decision-makers select alternatives in different fields of knowledge. Nonetheless, these methods have been criticized due to the rank reversal problem, where the independence of the irrelevant alternative principle is violated after the initial decision problem is changed. Over the course of this study, we observed that the solutions that are proposed for this problem, in the context of sustainable material selection, are insufficient. Thus, we present a new material selection approach that is based on the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method, which is immune to rank reversal. We also demonstrate the causes of rank reversal in the TOPSIS method, how the R-TOPSIS method was designed to solve them, and how it can be applied to sustainable material selection.

Keywords: multi-criteria decision-making; TOPSIS; R-TOPSIS; rank reversal; sustainable material selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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