Sustainable supplier evaluation and transportation planning in multi-level supply chain networks using multi-attribute- and multi-objective decision making

Supplier selection and transportation planning are essential tasks in managing supply chain networks (SCNs). The choice of a supplier has a significant influence on the transportation planning of SCNs, as the transportation routes will change. A limited number of studies in the literature have addressed the supplier selection and transportation planning issues simultaneously. This study proposes a two-stage multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach for sustainable supplier evaluation and transportation planning in multi-level SCNs. Initially, a supplier evaluation framework is proposed using the modified indifference threshold-based attribute ratio analysis (ITARA) and the performance calculation technique of the integrated multiple multi-attribute decision-making (PCIM-MADM) to determine the supplier's performance index. Subsequently, a multi-level SCN model is established, and the sustainable supplier selection and transportation planning problem is solved by the fuzzy multi-objective linear programming (FMOLP) method. A set of real-world data provided by a smart audio manufacturing company has been used to demonstrate the proposed approach. Decision-makers understand the importance of criteria through the weights constructed by the modified ITARA. Moreover, the results of the PCIM-MADM can effectively determine the supplier's ranking and provide improving strategies for underperforming suppliers. The augmented max–min technique of the FMOLP can produce a single optimal solution of the transportation allocation. The results show that our approach can effectively evaluate sustainable supplier performance and optimize transportation planning in SCNs.