Green supplier selection for sustainable development of the automotive industry using grey decision-making

Sustainable development is a common global theme of the 21st century. Global environmental issues have attracted increasing public attention in recent years. As one of the most important industries in Taiwan, the automotive industry needs to implement green supply chain management to comply with current trends, and the selection of suppliers of green parts is particularly important in this regard. Supplier selection is a classic case of multiple‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM). A traditional method, called the decision‐making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL)‐based analytical network process (ANP) (DANP), is appropriate to solve the problem of supplier selection. This study proposes a novel variant of DANP, called grey DANP, to effectively reduce the huge problem arising from pairwise comparisons. An empirical study was used to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed grey DANP. It contributes to finding the key factors of selecting green suppliers for Taiwan's automotive industry, including technology, delivery time, environmental management system and pollution control. The cause–effect relationships among key factors indicate that the environmental management system should be given more attention by manufacturers in the selection of green suppliers.