A New Framework for Sustainable Supplier Selection Based on a Plant Growth Simulation Algorithm

With the intensification of global competition and the increasing awareness of reducing energy consumption, sustainable supplier selection is crucial for establishing a solid cooperative relationship in sustainable supply chain management. This paper proposes a new framework that considers both the effective expression of uncertain information and the objective weights of decision makers to select sustainable suppliers. We first apply an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy set to express the information of decision makers. Moreover, this paper applies a plant growth simulation algorithm to aggregate decision makers’ information. Next, we adopt the similarity measure method to derive the target weight of each decision maker. Then, we apply the score function to rank the candidate sustainable suppliers. Finally, two practical cases are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The outcomes and comparative discussion show that the developed framework is efficient for sustainable supplier selection. Therefore, the proposed framework can be used to establish a solid cooperative relationship in the process of sustainable supply chain management.