A Fuzzy Multiple - Purpose Model for Selecting Suppliers

Nowadays, supplying sources from outside a company has become an important business approach. A lot of models have been developed to solve the supplier selection problem. Among them, multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) has been used by lots of authors and researchers with acceptable results. A review of literature on supplier selection shows that although supplier selection is a multi-objective problem, the nature of this multi objective problem has remained unknown. In many cases, except cost, other important parameters like quality, lead time and risk are not considered. Also practically, the effect of the nature of uncertain and imprecise facts on decision making like objectives, constraints and parameters cant be disregarded. To take account of these uncertainties, this research uses fuzzy method. Discount and costs due to inventory keeping in the goal function have been considered simultaneously. We also have considered objectives like decreasing the defected parts, and late delivery.