Sustainable battery supplier evaluation of new energy vehicles using a distributed linguistic outranking method considering bounded rational behavior

Due to policy promotion towards new energy vehicles, battery supplier evaluation, as a critical multi-faceted decision problem, is the foundation of the good quality of products or service and further long-term development of enterprises. Most of methods have been proposed to measure the performance of potential candidates from the sustainable dimension, but they may ignore resilient and smart criteria, i.e., risk resistance capacity and smart technologies application, relating to normal supply and product reliability. Additionally, prior studies mainly report on the priority of suppliers from perfect rationality of the decision maker, but they pay little attention to indifference and incomparability relations between suppliers and bounded rationality of the decision maker. Therefore, this paper proposes an outranking based multi-criteria behavioral decision making method, named as prospect theory-based distributed linguistic ORESTE method to portray three outranking relations, preference, indifference and incomparability, from the view of bounded rationality of the decision maker. This approach adopts linguistic distribution to reveal the uncertain preference along with good flexibility and adaptability. It is applied to the battery supplier selection in new energy vehicles enterprises. Comparative analysis indicates the availability and superiority and sensitivity analysis verifies its stability.