Dealing with uncertainties of green supplier selection: a fuzzy approach

Increasing public awareness of environmental protection has caused the emergence of green supply chain management in recent years. As firms tend to outsource a significant part of their activities, the importance of supplier selection increases from a competitive standpoint. While most studies of supplier selection have introduced methods based on economic criteria, the number of studies that incorporate environmental issues is rather limited. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to address the green supplier evaluation and selection issue by first identifying the appropriate criteria and then developing a model for their measurement in the evaluation process. The authors apply fuzzy set theory to deal with the subjectivity of supplier selection decision-making and capture the linguistic terms used for human assessments. A rule-based fuzzy inference system is developed to evaluate suppliers based on ten environmental criteria and eventually select the best-performing supplier. The dynamic nature of the model allows the decision-makers to manipulate the importance of different supplier attributes and constructed rules, based on individual preferences. An illustrative example is also presented to show the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.