Supplier selection in a multi-item/multi-supplier environment

Suppliers play a pivotal role in success of any organization. Supplier Selection is a complicated problem due to the vagueness of data and also its multi-criteria nature and the real world still observes a noticeable gap between its theory and practice. The aim of this paper is to present a fuzzy decision-making approach to address this problem in a way that facilitates the process of decision making while not deteriorating its comprehensiveness. The main contributions of the paper are twofold: First, a model is developed to consider multiple suppliers and multiple items. Moreover, a Piecewise Linear Membership Function (PLMF) is proposed for a specific criterion and is shown how it leads to better solutions. The model functions well in cases where decision maker is sensitive about a specific criterion, in other words, when there are some unequal weights for objectives of the problem. Although asymmetric methods proposed by Zimmerman are a way to tackle the above-mentioned situations; it is demonstrated that how the proposed model brings about both efficiency and simplicity for decision maker which is originated from the utilization of PLMF.