A hybrid hierarchical soft computing approach for the technology selection problem in brick industry considering environmental competencies: A case study

Brick manufacturing is an important industry which produces some fundamental building materials. Since brick production industries have environmental adverse effects such as air pollution, excessive energy consumption as well as waste production, they have become more challenging to manage as they face increasing pressure to improve economic performance and the green and clean production concerns. Concerning these issues and taking into account the current state of the literature in this area, this paper, proposes a hybrid hierarchical fuzzy multiple-criteria group decision making (HH-FMCGDM) model based on a modified fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (MFAHP) to evaluate and rank the related alternative technologies based on various criteria including economic, environmental, market related, technical advantages, and so on. In the proposed method MFAHP is utilized to determine the weights of the criteria. Also, a new method is presented to assign a weight factor for each decision maker (DM) in the group decision-making process. Also, we propose a fuzzy extended version of TOPSIS method as an evaluation tool to calculate the local priority of candidates of brick manufacturing technologies. Afterward, in order to avoid the data loss of DMs' judgments, the final rank of alternatives are obtained based on the proposed last aggregation approach. To illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach, a real-life case study in a brick industry is done based on our approach. Then, a sensitivity analysis is done to assess the robustness and sensitiveness of the obtained results from the proposed approach. Finally, some managerial insights are suggested to increase the applicability of the proposed HH-FMCGDM approach for real cases.