Smart Technology Prioritization for Sustainable Manufacturing in Emergency Situation by Integrated Spherical Fuzzy Bounded Rationality Decision-Making Approach

Abstract

The delays and disruptions during the pandemic have awakened interest in the sustainability and resilience of production systems to emergencies. In that context, the deployment of smart technologies has emerged as an almost mandatory development orientation to ensure the stability of manufacturing. The core value of smart technologies is to reduce the dependence on human labor in production systems. Thereby, the negative impacts caused by emergency situations are mitigated. However, the implementation of smart technologies in a specific production system that already exists requires a high degree of suitability. Motivated by this fact, this study proposes an integrated spherical fuzzy bounded rationality decision-making approach, which is composite of the spherical fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (SF DEMATEL) and the spherical fuzzy regret theory-based combined compromise solution (R-SF CoCoSo) method. The proposed approach reflects both the ambiguities and psychological behaviors of decision-makers in prioritization problems. It was applied to prioritize seven smart technologies for manufacturing in Vietnam. The results show that reliability, costs, and maturity are the most important criteria for choosing smart technology which is suitable for an existing production system in Vietnam. Our findings seem to suggest that the automatic inspection, remote machine operation, and robots are the most suitable smart technologies to stabilize and sustain production in Vietnam for emergency situations.