A Fuzzy Multiobjective Programming Approach for Vendor Selection in Iron & Steel Enterprise

The purpose of this paper is to study vendor selection problem with multi-vendor and multi-item in iron & steel industry. Firstly, the native fuzziness, derived from some uncertainty information, of some parameters in decision-making objectives is analyzed. After that, a fuzzy multiobjective programming model is formulated, with procurement quantity as decision variable, minimizing the net cost, minimizing the quantity of raw materials rejected and delayed as fuzzy goals and buyer’s demand, buyer’s budget, buyer’s technical prescription, vendors’ supply elasticity, vendors’ capabilities as constraints. Furthermore, the fuzzy optimization problem formulation is transformed into an equivalent formulation for the purpose of optimization after the membership functions of the fuzzy objectives are known, which is then solved for procurement decision making. Finally, an example is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach.