A group consensus decision making based sustainable supplier selection method by combing DEMATEL and VIKOR

Sustainable supplier selection (SSS) plays an increasingly critical role in the stability and development of the organization with increasing environmental awareness. This article proposes a linguistic multiple attribute group decision-making method to select the appropriate sustainable supplier by combing Decision Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory(DEMATEL) and VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). To do that, a distribution linguistic based DEMATEL technique is developed to deal with the complexity in criteria of SSS. To eliminate the inconsistency among multiple decision-makers providing the preference information of evaluation criteria, a minimum adjusting cost feedback mechanism is utilized to reach group consensus. Therefore, the proposed weights obtaining method can not only deal with the subjectivity of evaluation criterion but also satisfy group decision-makers with different profits and backgrounds. Then, based on the evaluation matrices of supplier performance, it calculates the ranking of alternative suppliers by the VIKOR method. Hence, it can deal with the ambiguity of decision makers’ evaluation and provide the best solution for decision-makers, as a consequence, it makes the final evaluation result more feasible and operable. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of this method are verified based on the actual situation of ABC Company. This study proposed a linguistic multiple attribute group decision-making method to select the appropriate sustainable supplier by combing Decision Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory(DEMATEL) and VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). What’s more, the proposed method considered the group consensus reaching processes.