Green-Building-Material Supplier Selection with a Rough-Set-Enhanced Quality Function Deployment

Zhiying Zhang, Huchang Liao, Jiaying Chang and Abdullah Al-barakati
Additional contact information
Zhiying Zhang: Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China
Huchang Liao: Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China
Jiaying Chang: Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China
Abdullah Al-barakati: Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 24, 1-21

Abstract: Building material supplier evaluation and selection is a significant strategic-decision problem for reducing construction costs and ensuring the quality of a residential product. As people are increasingly concerning about the green level of a residential product and the competition in the housing market is becoming increasingly fierce, it becomes important to select a green customer-oriented material supplier for property developers. Quality function deployment (QFD) has been proven to be an effective quality-control technique to take customer voices into consideration. However, the relationship matrix in the QFD technique, as a key to translate customer requirements into technical attributes, was subjectively given by decision-makers in previous studies, which failed to reflect customer requirements accurately. The aim of this study is to put forward a neighborhood-rough-set-based quality function deployment model for a green-building-material supplier selection. The neighborhood rough set, as a nonparametric and flexible data-mining approach, can effectively and objectively determine the core relationships between a variety of factors. A rough number-based aggregation approach is applied to effectively and objectively aggregate the evaluations given by a group of experts. Then, the classical double normalization-based multiple aggregation method, which considers two types of normalization methods, three aggregation models, and a comprehensive score formula, is extended in rough-number form in order to rank the alternatives. Afterward, an attempt is made to evaluate and rank eleven alternative building-material suppliers for a repute property developer in mainland China, and the corresponding comparative and sensitive analyses verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed hybrid model.

Keywords: building-material supplier selection; multi-attribute group decision making; quality function deployment; neighborhood rough set theory; rough number (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/24/7153/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/24/7153/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:24:p:7153-:d:297756

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().