Supplier Selection in the Sustainable Supply Chain: The Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process and Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis

The development and management of an effective and efficient supply chain involve the selection of the suppliers. Only economic criteria, including cost and delivery, once used to be considered in the process of supplier selection. But, they do not suffice for the evaluation of suppliers anymore due to the rapidly changing environment, and different perspectives are needed to be considered. The present paper aims to present a hybrid method based on fuzzy data envelopment analysis for sustainable supplier selection. At first, the criteria for sustainable supplier selection are derived from the relevant literature. Then, the hierarchy of the criteria and their preferential interrelations are specified by analytic hierarchy process. Eventually, the performance of the suppliers is evaluated using fuzzy data envelopment analysis. The presented DEA model has been inspired by the concept of ideal and anti-ideal decision-making units (DMUs) in the evaluation of cross-efficiency. According to this concept, a DMU is efficient if it is close to the ideal DMU’s performance and far from the anti-ideal DMU’s performance.