A grey-based rough decision-making approach to supplier selection

In this paper, we propose a grey-based rough set approach to deal with the supplier selection in supply chain management. The proposed approach takes advantage of mathematical analysis power of grey system theory while at the same time utilizing data mining and knowledge discovery power of rough set theory. It is suitable to the decision-making under more uncertain environments. We also provide a viewpoint on the attribute values in rough set decision table under the condition that all alternatives are described by linguistic variables that can be expressed in grey number. The most suitable supplier can be determined by grey relational analysis based on grey number. A case of supplier selection was used to validate the proposed approach.