Smart and sustainable supplier selection using interval type-2 fuzzy AHP

Abstract

Government regulations, customers' environmental awareness, quality of life-improving efforts and developments in the information and communication system have almost obliged organizations to consider smart and sustainable factors while evaluating their suppliers. Working with suitable suppliers in terms of technological, environmental and social aspects as well as economic aspects, will be the basis for smart and sustainable supply chains. An effective supplier selection running is also needed to continue the process in harmony. The issue of supplier selection is one of the multi-criteria decision- making problems that requires consideration of many qualitative and/or quantitative factors. In this study, Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method with interval type-2 fuzzy sets, which are more flexible and successful in reflecting uncertainty for fuzzy decision-making problems with contradictory criteria, was proposed to evaluate the overall performance of suppliers. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, an empirical study was conducted on the evaluation of material suppliers for an automotive manufacturer and a comparative scenario analysis was performed to investigate the effect of different criteria under different conditions.