"A Hybrid Decision Support System for Supplier Selection: An integration of Simheuristics and MCDM"
Mohammad Dehghanimohammadabadi

Supplier selection plays a key role in achieving the objectives of a supply chain system. Multiple strategic, operational, quantitative, and qualitative criteria influence the supplier selection process. A wide spectrum of criteria have been introduced, classified, and used by researchers and practitioners to evaluate the suppliers’ performance; however, measuring and employment of all of these criteria is impractical in real-world scenarios due to the budget, time, and information limitations. In this study, a Decision Support System (DSS) is proposed to help managers identify the most significant criteria for the supplier selection process. This DSS is a two-fold integration of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and Simheuristic where a Metaheuristic algorithm is combined with a simulation module. In an iterative manner, the Metaheuristic algorithm changes the setting of the MCDM, until the best/good combination of the criteria for the supplier selection process are obtained. The simulation model is utilized as a cost function of the Metaheuristic algorithm, in which the performance of the generated solutions (MCDM settings) are tested.