A Rough Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for Sustainable Supplier Selection under Vague Environment

Huiyun Lu, Shaojun Jiang, Wenyan Song and Xinguo Ming
Additional contact information
Huiyun Lu: School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Shaojun Jiang: School of Information Engineering, Handan University, Handan 056005, China
Wenyan Song: School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Xinguo Ming: School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-20

Abstract: With the growing awareness of environmental and social issues, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has received considerable attention both in academia and industry. Supplier selection plays an important role in the successful implementation of sustainable supply chain management, because it can influence the performance of SSCM. Sustainable supplier selection is a typical multi-criteria decision-making problem involving subjectivity and vagueness. Although some previous researches of supplier selection use fuzzy approaches to deal with vague information, it has been criticized for requiring much priori information and inflexibility in manipulating vagueness. Moreover, the previous methods often omit the environmental and social evaluation criteria in the supplier selection. To manipulate these problems, a new approach based on the rough set theory and ELECTRE (ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité) is developed in this paper. The novel approach integrates the strength of rough set theory in handling vagueness without much priori information and the merit of ELECTRE in modeling multi-criteria decision-making problem. Finally, a case study of sustainable supplier selection for solar air-conditioner manufacturer is provided to demonstrate the application and potential of the approach.

Keywords: sustainability; supplier selection; vague information; rough set theory; ELECTRE (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2622/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2622/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:8:p:2622-:d:160064

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().