Fuzzy Multi-choice Goal Programming for Supplier Selection

Supplier selection decision is an important issue of purchasing management in supply chain management involving multiple objectives; however, it is difficult to solve because objectives are often conflicting in nature. This study integrates multi-choice goal programming (MCGP) and fuzzy approaches as decision aids to help decision makers to choose better suppliers by considering multiple aspiration levels and vague goal relations. According to the function of multiple aspirations provided by the fuzzy MCGP (FMCGP), decision makers can set fuzzy relations among multiple supplier goals with linguistic quantifiers according to their different strategies. Also, decision makers can define the membership function for each linguistic quantifier to describe their ambiguous selection preference in supplier selection. With the FMCGP method, decision makers can obtain the order quantities for suitable suppliers based on different organizations’ supply chain strategies. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method, a real-world case of a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitor and acrylic sheet manufacturer is presented.