A novel hybrid model based on DEMATEL, ANP and TOPSIS for supplier selection in agile supply chains

The concept of the agile supply chain has been considered as means of achieving a high competitive edge in rapidly changing business environments. Among the involved decisions, supply partner selection process is a complex multi-criteria problem which has recently been studied by academicians and practitioners. This paper examines both quantitative and qualitative factors to propose a robust multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method which leads to consider the interactions among criteria for agile supply chains. In this regard, a novel hybrid MCDM model including DEMATEL, ANP, and TOPSIS is developed in which DEMATEL is adopted to visualise influenced framework between the elements, and influence degree of the criteria, then these influence degrees are embedded into ANP to compute relevant weights of criteria to obtain their relative importance; next, TOPSIS is dedicated to rank priorities of the alternatives of agile suppliers. Additionally, a case study is presented to validate the developed framework.