Selecting Green Supplier of Thermal Power Equipment by Using a Hybrid MCDM Method for Sustainability

With the growing worldwide awareness of environmental protection and sustainable development, green purchasing has become an important issue for companies to gain environmental and developmental sustainability. Thermal power is the main power generation form in China, and the green supplier selection is essential to the smooth and sustainable construction of thermal power plants. Therefore, selecting the proper green supplier of thermal power equipment is very important to the company's sustainable development and the sustainability of China's electric power industry. In this paper, a hybrid fuzzy multi-attribute decision making approach (fuzzy entropy-TOPSIS) is proposed for selecting the best green supplier. The fuzzy set theory is applied to translate the linguistic preferences into triangular fuzzy numbers. The subjective criteria weights are determined by using decision makers' superiority linguistic ratings and the objective ones are determined by combining the superiority linguistic ratings and fuzzy-entropy weighting method. The fuzzy TOPSIS is employed to generate an overall performance score for each green supplier. An empirical green supplier selection is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of this proposed fuzzy entropy-TOPSIS approach. This proposed fuzzy entropy-TOPSIS approach can select the proper green supplier of thermal power equipment, which contributes to promoting the company's sustainable development and the sustainability of China's electric power industry to some extent.