Developing sustainable supplier selection criteria for solar air-conditioner manufacturer: An integrated approach

Due to the increasing awareness of environmental and social issues, many practitioners and researchers have paid much attention to the sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) in recent years. Sustainable supplier selection is one of the most critical activities in the SSCM which can affect supply chain performance. However, the previous literature rarely considers the interrelationships between economic, environmental, and social evaluation criteria in the supplier selection. Moreover, the effect of the criteria importance on the criteria interrelationships is scarcely discussed in previous researches. To deal with these problems, a novel integrated methodology is developed in this paper. The proposed method integrates the merit of pairwise comparison method in determining relative importance, the strength of decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) in manipulating the complex and intertwined problems with fewer data, and the rough number's advantage in flexibly dealing with vague information. A case study in a solar air-conditioner manufacturer is provided to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.