Coping Uncertainty in the Supplier Selection Problem Using a Scenario-Based Approach and Distance Measure on Type-2 Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets

Supplier selection (SS) is a process in which companies identify, evaluate, and select suppliers. The MCDM methods are often used for supplier selection in supply chain management. An unlimited number of MCDM techniques, such as analytic hierarchy process (AHP), analytic network process (ANP), the technique of order preference distance to the ideal solution (TOPSIS), etc., have been deployed to solve the supplier selection problems. Though they can manage problem complexity, MCDM techniques cannot deal with problem uncertainty. Hence, they have been combined with the fuzzy set, intuitionistic fuzzy set, etc., to provide more accurate solutions to supplier selection problems. Nonetheless, the future uncertainty related to the environmental changes is ignored in the SS literature. Therefore, we use future scenarios as criteria to select the best supplier in this study. Moreover, we applied a distance measure to rank Type-2 Intuitionistic Fuzzy Set, which is a suitable approach to deal with the vagueness of verbal judgments. A numerical example explains the 5-step proposed approach.