Date of Award

Fall 2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering

Program/Concentration

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Committee Director

Andrew J. Collins

Committee Member

Steven Cotter

Committee Member

Ariel Pinto

Abstract

In the 21st century, businesses are constantly striving for competitive advancement and increasing their economic performance in the rapidly changing market. Collaboration with other businesses and partnerships with them are becoming more common. As such, businesses are starting to invest in finding the right partners to stay competitive in an ever-changing business landscape. Suppliers play a crucial role in businesses' decision-making as they provide the materials, goods, and services necessary for a company to operate and succeed. Therefore, their selection, management, and relationship must be carefully considered to ensure optimal performance and profitability. A sustainable framework in a business's relationship with suppliers helps to ensure ethical and environmentally responsible practices and long-term viability for both parties. So, the supply chain will benefit from the right supplier selection and incorporating a sustainability framework. However, supplier selection is a complex adaptive system with uncertainty and dynamics. Moreover, incorporating a sustainability framework with economic, environmental, and social dimensions into the supplier selection process would add an extra layer of complexity to the decision-making process. Decision-makers have long faced difficulties in modeling supplier selection, especially large-scale, due to the level of complexity. While many modeling approaches are documented in the literature, not all of them can adequately account for stochastics and large-scale complex supplier selection. Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) is an effective modeling approach for investigating stochastic environments. ABMS provides decision-makers with a deeper understanding of complex systems involving multiple autonomous interacting agents by using simple rules to design, model, and analyze them. This research proposes an agent-based model of sustainable supplier selection to show simulation ability in addressing more uncertainty factors and dynamism in large-scale supplier selection and hopes to provide valuable insights and meaningful results to the supply chain field.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/twvd-yd63

ISBN

9798302855312

ORCID

0000-0001-7512-900X

Download

Share

COinS