A green supplier selection and evaluation using multicriteria decision analysis

The problem of supplier selection and evaluation is considered as one of the most critical procedures within a company and
has gathered the attention of scholars, particularly in recent studies. Nevertheless, the importance of including
environmental factors to the selection and evaluation of suppliers has received much less attention. Over the last years
though, it has become a matter of great concern, mainly due to the diminishing raw material resources, overflowing waste
sites, and increasing level of pollution. As many factors should be taken into consideration and the complexity is increasing
when the environmental dimension is added multicriteria decision analysis is preferred for these kinds of problems. This
paper presents a new approach where environmental criteria are considered along with the traditional criteria based on the
fuzzy UTASTAR method. The fuzzy UTASTAR method is a preference disaggregation approach that can consider the level of
uncertainty in the examining criteria evaluations. Such an approach may offer a new perspective to the problem of green
supplier selection and evaluation and will be incorporated with a dynamic supplier evaluation system. To test the validity of
the model, the proposed approach is applied in a food industry.