A fuzzy approach for supplier evaluation and selection in supply chain management

This paper is aimed to present a fuzzy decision-making approach to deal with the supplier selection problem in supply chain system. During recent years, how to determine suitable suppliers in the supply chain has become a key strategic consideration. However, the nature of these decisions usually is complex and unstructured. In general, many quantitative and qualitative factors such as quality, price, and flexibility and delivery performance must be considered to determine suitable suppliers. In this paper, linguistic values are used to assess the ratings and weights for these factors. These linguistic ratings can be expressed in trapezoidal or triangular fuzzy numbers. Then, a hierarchy multiple criteria decision-making model based on fuzzy-sets theory is proposed to deal with the supplier selection problems in the supply chain system. According to the concept of the TOPSIS, a closeness coefficient is defined to determine the ranking order of all suppliers by calculating the distances to both the fuzzy positive-ideal solution and fuzzy negative-ideal solution simultaneously. Finally, an example is shown to highlight the procedure of the proposed method at the end of this paper. This paper shows that the proposed model is very well suited as a decision-making tool for supplier selection decisions.