A new multi-criteria, multi-phase, and multi-decision makers’ approach to the agricultural sustainability problem

Making decisions in the agriculture sector is a complex and challenging process, especially when aiming for sustainability. Decision makers (DMs) face multiple contradictions, particularly when trying to reduce environmental and social impacts without decreasing economic profits. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to support a group of DMs in choosing the most sustainable agricultural practices, extraction method, and waste recovery management method so that the entire product life cycle becomes circular and sustainable. To achieve this goal, we propose a new multi-criteria framework to help DMs to rank the different life cycle scenarios. The main contributions of this article are as following: first, to build sustainable scenarios under the circular economy thinking, the Structured Analysis and Design Technique has been integrated to close and valorize the waste loops for each scenario. Then, the 2-Tuple model was used to deal with uncertainty in expert knowledge application. Afterward, a synthetic dynamic weight algorithm was used to aggregate the DMs opinions. Next, the VIKOR method was extended with the 2-Tuple model to rank the sustainability of each scenario. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach, a case study of olive oil life cycle in Sfax-Tunisia was conducted. Also, we perform a sensitivity analysis to reveal the effect of the subjective parameter variations on the initially obtained ranking. Finally, the obtained results prove that the proposed method is more accurate and effective for the agricultural sustainability problem. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023.