Multi-Criteria Supplier Selection Decisions in Supply Chain Networks: A Multi-Objective Optimization Approach

Competition among firms in current global market shifts to competition among networks of firms and it forces supply networks to negotiate and cooperate with all partners more than ever. Collaborative initiatives such as collaborative design, collaborative planning, forecasting and open collective innovations are increasingly accepted as approaches to effectively support decision-making processes in a variety of domains, including, manufacturing, education, health-care and software industry (Camilleri and Hernandez, 2016). Demands and constraints in the supply chain design operations are worthy of attention. The present paper is intended to study the supplier selection problem in a network of suppliers and buyers in the context of a multi-product supply chain. In the beginning, quality measures for supplier selection are collected and categorized into seven areas. Every quality area has been evaluated using the proposed fuzzy variables. In order to rank each product of each supplier in the view of every buyer, fuzzy AHP algorithm was applied. A multi-objective integer programing model was designed to make the whole network beneficial from cost as well as quality metrics. A Genetic Algorithm (3 dimensional) was presented in this study to gain acceptable solution in an advance way. An illustrative example is presented in this paper to transparent the proposed algorithm.