Textile supplier selection in sustainable supply chain using a modular fuzzy inference system model

Abstract Today’s fashion clothing market is highly competitive and the textile and clothing industry is a significant area of the world’s economy. In addition, the sustainability issues have received a lot of attention in the textile supply chains. Since supplier evaluation and selection is a crucial decision in supply chain management, this paper proposes a framework for textile suppliers’ sustainability evaluation criteria and a new model based on this framework onto ranking a given list of suppliers. The relative importance of criteria and the suppliers’ performance with respect to criteria are considered based on decision-makers’ preferences in the model. To cope with the subjectivity of decision-makers’ opinions, fuzzy set theory has been applied and a modular model on the basis of Fuzzy Inference System is proposed. A real-life supplier selection problem for the textile industry is utilized to show the feasibility of the proposed model. Validation of the proposed model is studied through an existing literature model. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed model.