An Integrated Sustainable Supplier Selection Approach Based on Hybrid Information Aggregation

• Main Authors: Xiongyong Zhou, Zhiduan Xu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-07-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: sustainable supplier selection; DEMATEL; ANP; fuzzy VIKOR; IVTFN; hybrid information aggregation; TBL theory
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/7/2543

With a great emphasis on both social and environmental responsibilities, sustainable supply chain management has gradually been adopted and promoted as an innovative business model. In sustainable supply chain practice, the choice of sustainable suppliers relates to the long-term development of a company. While the environmental performance of suppliers has been commonly considered, the social dimension has not yet received enough attention. This paper first proposes a novel criteria system for evaluating sustainable suppliers from three aspects and six dimensions, and then introduces an integrated evaluation model with a novel hybrid information aggregation. To verify the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method, a real case of a large supermarket is introduced and analyzed. The research results show that (1) the indicator system based on Triple Bottom Line theory can serve as a framework of sustainable supplier selection for manufacturing and circulation enterprises; (2) the introduction of hybrid information aggregation can effectively handle the uncertainties of indicator scores under the realistic fuzzy environment and objectively reflect the intentions of the scorers; and (3) in comparison with the TOPSIS algorithm, the priority order finally obtained is consistent, but the proposed model shows more robustness in the sensitivity test.