R Mohammad Ebrahim - Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
J Razmi - Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

In order to provide decision makers with a practical model for multi criteria, multi-item supplier selection problem under the situation that suppliers may offer different discount models a linear integer model is developed in which a weighted sum of four objective functions (cost, defective items, late deliveries and total weight of purchasing which projects the effects of qualitative criteria) is used to develop the main objective function. Due to the complexity of the problem, a Meta heuristic algorithm is proposed based on the Scatter Search Algorithm (SSA) to solve this problem. Then, its performance is evaluated through solving some sample problems and comparing the results with the Branch and Bound’s (B&B) outcomes. This evaluation shows that the proposed SSA can find high quality solutions within reasonably shorter computational times.

Supplier selection, Scatter Search, MCDM, linear optimization