A rough multi-criteria decision-making approach for sustainable supplier selection under vague environment

With the growing awareness of environmental and social issues, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has received considerable attention both in academia and industry. Supplier selection plays an important role in the successful implementation of sustainable supply chain management, because it can influence the performance of SSCM. Sustainable supplier selection is a typical multi-criteria decision-making problem involving subjectivity and vagueness. Although some previous researches of supplier selection use fuzzy approaches to deal with vague information, it has been criticized for requiring much priori information and inflexibility in manipulating vagueness. Moreover, the previous methods often omit the environmental and social evaluation criteria in the supplier selection. To manipulate these problems, a new approach based on the rough set theory and ELECTRE (ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité) is developed in this paper. The novel approach integrates the strength of rough set theory in handling vagueness without much priori information and the merit of ELECTRE in modeling multi-criteria decision-making problem. Finally, a case study of sustainable supplier selection for solar air-conditioner manufacturer is provided to demonstrate the application and potential of the approach.