Brick manufacturing is an important industry which produces some fundamental building materials.

Since brick manufacturing industries have environmental adverse effects such as air pollution, excessive consumption of resources and energy, and severe waste production, they have become more challenging to manage because they face increasing pressure to improve economic performance and the green and clean production concerns. In this paper, we investigate whether there exists a multiple-criteria decision-making process for the selection of an optimal brick manufacturing technology as a strategic issue that can deal with these concerns. We consider a hybrid hierarchical fuzzy multiple-criteria group decision making (HH-FMCGDM) model based on a modified fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (MFAHP).

We first use the MFAHP methodology to determine the weights of the criteria. We then develop a new method to determine the weight of each decision maker (DM) in the group decision-making process. We also propose a fuzzy extended version of TOPSIS method as an evaluation tool to calculate the local priority of candidates of brick manufacturing technologies. Afterward, in order to avoid the data loss of DMs’ judgments, the final ranking of alternatives in conjunction with the proposed last aggregation approach is carried out. To demonstrate the efficiency and application of the proposed approach, a real-life case study in a brick industry is done based on our approach. Finally, some managerial insights are suggested to increase the applicability of the proposed HH-FMCGDM approach for managers in real cases.