Evaluation and Ranking of Sustainable Third-party Logistics Providers using the D-Analytic Hierarchy Process

Nowadays, the relative importance of logistics and sustainable supply chain cannot be denied and third-party logistics as one of the logistics management strategies can play an important role for many industry owners to consider their sustainability goals. The goal of this paper is to choose the best third-party logistics provider to achieve a sustainable logistics system, because third-party logistics service is mainly dependent on both transportation and workforces, managing them is one of the important issues of sustainability. Thus, third-party logistics providers need to be concerned about not only the economic criteria but also issues related to environmental and social sustainability in addition to two other dimensions namely technical and reputation. In this paper, a comprehensive classification of related criteria, sub-criteria, and sub-sub-criteria is proposed according to selecting the best third-party logistics provider. To evaluate and rank the proposed criteria, a D Number-Analytic Hierarchy Process method, as one of the proper and popular multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches, is utilized. Besides, a case study in dairy industry has been accomplished in the real-world to show the effectiveness and a better understanding of the proposed conceptual model. Finally, the best third-party logistics provider was identified among the alternatives for the proposed case study. The results showed that the proposed method could be a good alternative to conduct evaluations and the related sensitivity analysis, considering sustainability.