Mahmoud Khavarpour - Planning & Development Unit Sazeh Gostar Saipa , Iran
Soheil Hoseinpour

This study aims at improving the quality and effectiveness of decision-making for supplier selection in supply chain management. Supplier selection has long been recognized as one of the corporate core functions in competitive SCM. However, supplier selection is a process involving risk and uncertainty. In order to solve this stochastic problem, companies need to evaluate their suppliers carefully and make accurate decisions. For this reason, a systematic decision process is proposed for selecting suppliers. Basically, two stages of decision-making are described: the identification of nondominated supplier candidates and the selection of the best supplier. These stages are composed of an integrated approach based on a fuzzy heuristic multi-attribute utility method and a hierarchical fuzzy TOPSIS method. Finally, an application is given to demonstrate the potential of the methodology.

Supplier selection, Fuzzy sets, Heuristics, Multi-attribute utility function, TOPSIS method