New Approach to Identify the Most Sustainable Supplier Based on IFS

Abstract

To meet the expectations of consumers, who are increasingly demanding products that respect the concept of sustainable development (SD), companies are called upon to engage in an SD approach that begins with the selection of suppliers, taking into consideration the environmental, social and economic criteria. In this paper, we present a new model of selecting the best sustainable supplier. We have developed a hybrid model, which is built by extending the fuzzy set (FS) to the intuitionistic fuzzy set theory (IFS) and with the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method. Our model presented, allows us to measure the weight of the selected criteria of SD, to present an approach for defining the SD strategy within companies and finally to choose among the suppliers, the best supplier who respects the concept of SD by taking into consideration the links between the axe of SD. The results of the application of our approach have shown that our model can be easily used in all companies wishing to select sustainable suppliers. Keywords—Sustainable supplier selection; sustainable development; criteria; DEMATEL; intuitionistic fuzzy set; supply chain management.