A Rough-Fermatean DEMATEL Approach for Sustainable Development Evaluation for the Manufacturing Industry

With the increasing awareness of the importance of sustainable development, the evaluation of sustainability performance for the manufacturing has become an emerging issue of importance. Although many scholars have studied the issue of enterprise sustainability, to date, the institutional and risk control perspectives of sustainability have received less attention, particularly in manufacturing practices. To address research gap, this study develops a comprehensive framework for evaluating enterprise sustainability that encompasses the economic, social, environmental, institutional, and risk control dimensions. A novel group decision-making approach, called the Rough-Fermatean Fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory technique is proposed, which identifies the mutual relationships among the 15 evaluation criteria and generates the influence weights. Fermatean fuzzy theory is used to reflect the subjective judgment of experts and the inherent uncertainty in evaluation. Moreover, rough set theory is used to aggregate the multiple experts’ opinions and to retain potential information in the form of interval values. A case study of Taiwan’s electronics manufacturers is carried out to demonstrate the practicality and validity of the proposed approach. The results show that goodwill and corporate image, zero emission of pollutants and waste discharge, and corporate governance are the most influential sustainability criteria. This study can assist decision-makers in the manufacturing sector in developing more appropriate improvement strategies. Enterprises can improve their competitiveness and move towards sustainable development by first focusing on the more influential criteria. For academic researchers, the proposed framework and methodology can be applied to the discussion of sustainability evaluation in other industries.