An integrated information fusion and grey multi-criteria decision-making framework for sustainable supplier selection

Abstract

The recent changes in global business markets have forced supply chains to include sustainability and considerable uncertainty in their decision-making processes. In this study, we propose an integrated information fusion and grey multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework for solving sustainable supplier selection problems with imprecise information. We identify a series of criteria in the literature based on the economic, social, and environmental aspects of sustainability and obtain the relative importance of these criteria from experts' opinions. We then propose a best-worst method (BWM) integrated with grey theory to calculate the weights of criteria. These weights are used to evaluate a set of suppliers based on three sustainability aspects. A hybrid method composed of weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS), the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), and grey theory are proposed for ranking the suppliers. We aggregate the grey MCDM results with the concept of information fusion to find an integrated score for each supplier. The final ranking is obtained by incorporating expert opinions with the integrated scores. We also present a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework. A sensitivity analysis is performed to test the reliability and robustness of the results.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable supplier selection
• grey theory
• best-worst method
• weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS)
• TOPSIS
• information fusion

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful comments and suggestions. Dr. Madjid Tavana is grateful for the partial support he received from the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR 19-13946S) for this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The name is changed to protect the anonymity of the company.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Babak Aslani

Babak Aslani is a PhD student in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. He received a BS degree in Industrial Engineering from the K.N. Toosi University of Technology and an MSc degree in Industrial Management-Operations Research from Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. His research interests include Multi-objective Optimization, Evolutionary Algorithms, Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Multi-Criteria Decision Making.

Meysam Rabiee

Meysam Rabiee is a PhD student in Operations and Business Analytics at the University of Oregon. He has served as a faculty member and the Program Director of the Industrial Engineering Department at the Bu-Ali Sina University in Iran. His research interests include Sustainable Supply Chain, Multi-Criteria Decision Making, Multi-Objective Optimization, Data Analytics, Scheduling, and Decision Support Systems.

Madjid Tavana

Madjid Tavana is Professor and Distinguished Chair of Business Analytics at La Salle University, where he serves as Chairman of the Business Systems and Analytics Department. He also holds an Honorary Professorship in Business Information Systems at the University of Paderborn in Germany. Dr. Tavana is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Kennedy Space Center, the Johnson Space Center, the Naval Research Laboratory at Stennis Space Center, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. He was recently honored with the prestigious Space Act Award by NASA. He holds an MBA, PMIS, and PhD in Management Information Systems and received his Post-Doctoral Diploma in Strategic Information Systems from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published 17 books and over 270 research papers in international scholarly academic journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, International Journal of Management and Decision Making, International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Data Mining, International Journal of Strategic Decision Sciences, and International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems.