Sustainable Supplier Selection and Order Allocation in Supply Chains

Sustainable supplier selection and order allocation encompasses the processes by which organisations identify, evaluate and order from suppliers in a manner that balances economic performance with environmental stewardship and social responsibility. Decision makers typically face multiple conflicting criteria—such as cost, carbon footprint, resource efficiency, labour standards and supply reliability—under conditions of demand and supply uncertainty. To address this complexity, a range of quantitative techniques has been developed, including multi-criteria decision-making methods, fuzzy logic models and stochastic or robust mixed-integer programming. These approaches seek to integrate supplier choice with order allocation, ensuring that orders are optimally distributed across selected suppliers while meeting sustainability targets and operational constraints. Recent trends have extended traditional sustainability frameworks by embedding resilience metrics—enabling supply chains to absorb and recover from disruptions such as natural disasters, geopolitical crises or pandemics. Practical applications span industries from agri-food and pharmaceuticals to construction and energy, demonstrating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, improvements in resource use and enhanced network agility. The growing availability of digital decision support systems and real-time data streams is facilitating the operationalisation of these methods, with emerging directions pointing towards circular supply chains, blockchain-enabled traceability and the integration of sustainability optimisation with comprehensive risk management.

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Sustainable Supplier Selection and Order Allocation in Supply Chains publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in sustainable supplier selection and order allocation in supply chains across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Multi-criteria Decision-Making (MCDM): A suite of techniques for evaluating and prioritising alternatives based on multiple, often conflicting criteria.

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP): A structured MCDM method that decomposes a decision problem into a hierarchy of criteria and alternatives, assigning relative weights through pairwise comparisons.

Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS): An MCDM approach that ranks alternatives based on their distance from an ideal positive solution and a negative solution.

Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP): An optimisation framework that models decision variables as both continuous and discrete integers, commonly used to allocate orders under operational constraints.

Fuzzy Sets: A mathematical structure for modelling uncertainty and vagueness in decision parameters, allowing criteria to be expressed in linguistic terms rather than precise values.

Triple Bottom Line (TBL): A sustainability framework assessing performance across economic, environmental and social dimensions.

References

1. A decision support system for supplier selection and order allocation in stochastic, multi-stakeholder and multi-criteria environments. International Journal of Production Economics (2015).
2. An Integrated Decision-Making Approach for Green Supplier Selection in an Agri-Food Supply Chain: Threshold of Robustness Worthiness. Mathematics (2021).
3. An integrated multi-criteria decision-making and multi-objective optimization framework for green supplier evaluation and optimal order allocation under uncertainty. Decision Analytics Journal (2022).
4. A Smart Decision Support Framework for Sustainable and Resilient Supplier Selection and Order Allocation in the Pharmaceutical Industry. Sustainability (2023).