Developing a new data envelopment analysis methodology for supplier selection in the presence of both undesirable outputs and imprecise data

Supplier selection plays a key role in an organization because the cost of raw material constitutes the main cost of the final product. Selecting an appropriate supplier is now one of the most important decisions of the purchasing department. This decision generally depends on a number of different criteria. The objective of this paper is to propose a data envelopment analysis methodology that considers both undesirable outputs and imprecise data simultaneously. The proposed model is applied in supplier selection problem. A numerical example demonstrates the application of the proposed method.