Quantitative methods for sustainable supplier selection: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Both environmental and social issues are nowadays part of the decision-making process, but these aspects are not properly explored by the academic and professional literature about supplier selection. This is particularly true when considering the social perspective combined with quantitative-oriented selection methods. Thus, this paper presents a descriptive-explicative systematic literature review that collects, identifies, selects and critically analyzes several different quantitative methods for supplier selection, from both social and environmental viewpoints. In order to go beyond traditional literature reviews, this paper also employs both content analysis (via tag clouds) and correspondence method. Results indicate that the literature makes extensive use of combined approaches, mainly those merging fuzzy logic, multi-criteria, mathematical programming and artificial intelligence-based methods.