Low carbon supplier selection under multi-source and multi-attribute procurement

Under the development mode of low carbon economy, selecting the best low carbon supplier is the basis and prerequisite for establishing low carbon supply chain, and is the inevitable choice to achieve sustainable development for enterprises. In this paper, we investigate the problem of low carbon supplier selection in the multi-source and multi-attribute procurement. Concretely, we establish a new evaluation index system of low carbon supplier selection based on cost, low carbon, quality and service capacity. Then we present a multi-attribute decision making method for low carbon supplier selection based on a linguistic 2-tuple VIKOR method. In this proposed decision method, the hybrid attribute values (the real numbers and linguistic fuzzy variables coexist) are transformed into linguistic 2-tuples, and a ranking method based on an extended VIKOR method is then presented to rank all alternative suppliers. We also give an application example to highlight the implementation, availability, and feasibility of the proposed decision making method.