Supplier selection mechanism in electric coal procurement under sustainability

The electric energy mainly comes from thermal power generation fueled by electric coal, and the selection of electric coal supplier is of great practical significance for the development of electric power enterprises. In this paper, the mechanism of supplier selection in electric coal procurement is designed from a perspective of sustainability. Concretely, eleven evaluation indexes from three aspects of economy, environment, and society are selected to construct a new evaluation index system for selecting sustainable electric coal suppliers. Based on this index system, a new method of supplier selection in electric coal procurement based on 2-tuple correlation coefficient analysis is proposed. In this method, considering that the evaluation index values have the features of multi-source heterogeneous data, i.e., precise real number, interval number, and fuzzy linguistic variables coexist, all index values are converted into 2-tuples. Then, a 2-tuple deviation maximization method is proposed to determine the weight of each evaluation index, and a new method of 2-tuple correlation coefficient analysis is proposed to select sustainable electric coal suppliers. Moreover, the effectiveness and feasibility of the model are highlighted by an application example of selecting the electric coal suppliers. Combined with the development status of electric power industry and the research results of this paper, several countermeasures and suggestions are provided on how to formulate the optimal procurement strategy of electric coal for electric power enterprises and how to improve the competitiveness for electric coal suppliers.