Methods Supporting Supplier Selection Processes – Knowledge-based Approach

Nowadays, companies have to improve their practices in the management of sustainable supply chain with increased awareness of environmental, economic and social issues globally. Selecting the optimum sustainable supplier is crucial for sustainable supply chain management, which is a challenging multi-dimensional problem. From a systematic perspective, sustainable supplier selection problem can be separated into two parts, including criteria and methods. This paper concentrates on the method selection aspects, referring to their application examples. Thus, the objectives of this paper are twofold: one is to summarize the literature on supplier selection issues from related articles, then to present an attempt to ontology-based approach to handling knowledge about sustainable supplier selection methods. To meet this aim, ontology-based model is proposed to synthetize the knowledge of analyzed methods and related papers. Finally, the proposed ontology-based model is demonstrated by an empirical example of using competency questions to confirm its correctness and effectiveness.