Simultaneous selection of material and supplier under uncertainty in carton box industries: a fuzzy possibilistic multi-criteria approach

Abstract

A critical problem in carton box production industries arises when size, amount and supplier of raw sheet are to be determined in an uncertain and competitive environment from sheet price point of view. This study introduces a multi-criteria mixed integer formulation to select size, amount and supplier of raw sheets used in a case study of carton box manufacturing sector in order to minimize objectives such as cost, wastage of sheets and surplus of carton boxes simultaneously. To respect the uncertain market, some parameters of the problem such as demand of the boxes, price of raw sheets are considered as fuzzy numbers. To cope with uncertainty of the introduced mathematical formulation, a possibilistic approach is applied to convert the fuzzy formulation to a crisp model. In order to tackle the multi-criteria crisp formulation, a new multi-objective solution approach is proposed to solve the problem in comparison with four multi-objective optimization approaches such as LH, TH, SO, and ABS methods of the literature. Computational experiments and sensitivity analysis which are performed on real numerical data given by study case show the superior performance of the proposed approach compared to the others.