A new extension to a multi-criteria decision-making model for sustainable supplier selection under an intuitionistic fuzzy environment

Abstract

The increase of environmental pollution has led to the rise of sustainable awareness in recent years. This trend has motivated various industries to recognize the importance of implementing sustainable supply chain practices to seek economic, environmental and social advantages. From a sustainability perspective, selecting a suitable supplier is the main component of modern enterprises. It is also a challenging problem since several criteria concerning supplier selection are interdependent with a complex character. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is a new extension to multi-criteria decision-making model (MCDM) under an intuitionistic fuzzy environment for sustainable supplier selection (SSS) based on sustainable supply chain management SSCM practices. It consists of intuitionistic fuzzy set theory (IFS) with a decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) combined with an analytic network process (ANP) to identify uncertainties and interdependencies among criteria as well as analyzing the criteria weights. We modified Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) to evaluate and rank the desired level of sustainable supplier performance. The suggested approach is conducted by a case study from the Thailand palm oil industry. Results show that the proposed model not only can find the most suitable sustainable supplier, but also the enterprises can aid their suppliers in improving sustainability by using the proposed method and can improve enterprises' socio-environmental performance, which is key to achieving sustainable development.