Supplier Selection and Quota Allocation Decisions Under Uncertainty: Review and Future Research Directions

The rigorous pressure for outsourcing and competitive marketing has exerted firms to rethink about supplier selection strategies. To date, an extensive range of criteria and methods have been proposed to solve supplier selection and order allocation problems. The supplier selection problem is often faced by ambiguity and vagueness in practice. Very often decision makers express their preferences in linguistic terms instead of numerical values. In such circumstance integrated fuzzy methods are used to handle these uncertainties. This study aims to review the literatures on supplier selection and order allocation decisions in uncertain environments. Twelve journal articles published between 2008 and 2012 have been surveyed for this purpose. The articles are analyzed to summarize the criteria and methods to be relevant to different types of industries for supplier selection and order allocation problems in literature. In addition, some discussions on criteria and methods are done and presented in this paper. Finally, suggestions for future researches are proposed for academics and decision makers.