A Multi-Criteria Evaluation for Sustainable Supplier Selection Based on Fuzzy Sets

It is well known that sustainability strategies have moved further and further up over the past decade due to help companies to improve the effectiveness of their marketplace and perform better in their operations. For companies, sustainability would gain long-term consequences such as getting greater profits and creating their own consumer path. The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) is a key element of the companies to achieve social, environmental, and economic benefits. Supplier’s performance directly affects a company’s performance not only environmental or economic issues but also sustainable issues. Thus, Sustainable Supplier Selection (SSS) has become the highly relevant topic and many authors and researchers have focused on this subject. This study investigates a hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) framework based on TBL to determine sustainable suppliers. After construction of hierarchy, the integrated fuzzy MCDM algorithm is implemented. At first, Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is used for obtaining the weights of the main criteria and related sub-criteria. Then, fuzzy TOPSIS method is applied for ranking the suppliers. Additionally, interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs) that express uncertainty better than traditional type-1 fuzzy sets are used for selecting an appropriate supplier. The proposed approach is validated an actual case situation in Konya.