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

•An outranking based multi-criteria behavioral decision making method is proposed.•Battery supplier performance is measured from sustainable, resilient and smart dimensions.•Preference, indifference and incomparability relations between battery suppliers are analyzed.•Distance measurement and comparison method of linguistic distribution assessments are developed.•Practical sustainable battery supplier evaluation of new energy vehicles is conducted.