A Two-Stage Sustainable Supplier Selection Model Considering Disruption Risk

The global spread of the pandemic has changed many aspects of life and placed the supply chain at risk of disruption. To solve the problem of supplier selection under the risk of supply chain disruption, in this paper, we propose a two-stage evaluation model to address the issue of supplier selection in the context where a pandemic requires a lockdown. First, we incorporate the lead time into the epidemic model that predicts the evolution of the pandemic to identify suppliers that have a high risk of disruption caused by the pandemic’s evolution. Second, we propose a best–worst method combined with regret theory to rank candidate suppliers. Our model provides a dynamic link between the pandemic’s evolution and supplier selection, and it allows selecting suppliers according to various criteria while avoiding supply chain disruptions due to inappropriate supplier selection. We validate the proposed model on a real case study with epidemic data from China. This paper is the first to consider the impact of lockdowns during the pandemic on supplier selection. We develop a novel MCDM model BWM-RT for supplier selection; our model can be an effective decision support approach to help decision makers better cope with the risk of supply chain disruptions.