A Supplier Selection Decision-Making Approach for Complex Product Development Based on Hesitant Fuzzy Information

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is interesting for readers, as decision making in supplier selection, especially under uncertain and hesitant conditions, is up-to-date topic.

However, scientific soundness should be enhanced by reviewing more recent references. Now dominating references are up to 2018 and a single reference is 2019. The references of the last several years are missing. Therefore, please extend and update your literature review by newest references to show that you are familiar with the state of the research in your area as well as to substantiate the novelty of your research.  

Is your approach can be applies all over the World? I am asking because you write "The core component of manufacturing industry in China is the equipment manufacturing industry, in which most of the products are complex products" at the beginning of your paper. And what about other countries?

I appreciate that you presented a comparative analysis. However, you state that "the ranking result of alternative suppliers is uniform, which indicates that the proposed method is applicable and reliable in this paper". So please explain what is the superiority of your suggested approach as ranking order is uniform compared to other approaches? 

English is easy to read and understand, but grammar needs improvements. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you very much. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper deals with the problem of supplier selection. It is not clear why in the title of the paper is mentioned "for complex product development" - please remove this part or, if you decide to keep it, please better state in the body of the paper why the approch is suitable for complex product development and not to all the supplier selection problems.

I found the approach to be interesting, even though more information should be added to the steps explanation and the English should be improved.

Furthermore, it is highly appreciated that the authors have provided a numerical example. As the example is quite simple, could you please provide a more complex example or state/prove that the proposed approach remain feasible when the problem changes.

Also, the authors compare their result with other from the field proving that the results are similar. In this context, why do one need to use the current approach and not the others already provided in the scientific literature. Please discuss this point in the paper and argue for the ncessity of the current research. 

As the supplier selection problem is solved in the scientifi literature using various techniques (e.g. grey systems theory) could you please add a comparison with any of these alternative theories?

Please discuss implications to the theory and practice and add limitations.

Minor:

- please correct the typos in Figure 1: plase replace "mian" with "main". Also, please ry to add information on all the arrows in the figure.

-please improve English all over the paper.

English should be improved.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you very much.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for your large efforts. All my comments are perfectly addressed and I recommend acceptance. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the revised version of the paper and for the additions made to the document. I have no further comments.