Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Resources Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/resourpol Selecting sustainable supplier countries for Iran's steel industry at three levels by using AHP and TOPSIS methods Arezoo Azimifard, Seyed Hamed Moosavirad ⁎ , Shahram Ariafar Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Supplier selection Steel industry Sustainability AHP TOPSIS ABSTRACT Supplier selection as a multi-criteria decision-making problem that highly depends on the decision makers’ vision has a major issue among supply chain (SC) managers. SC sustainability, which pays attention to the environmental, economic, and social aspects in SC, has been recently highlighted in the evaluation process undergone by the SC managers. Suppliers, as the basic components of the SC, play a significant role in creating a sustainable SC. Hence, the first aim of this research is to determine the weights of sustainability criteria by using analytical hierarchy process. The second aim of this study is to evaluate suppliers based on four main criteria, CO 2 emissions, the number of employees in the suppliers’ country industry, water consumption and distance from supplier's country to the destination at three SC levels and the macroeconomic (international) level. In order to address the second goal of this research, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method as a multi-criteria decision-making method has been applied. In this research, Iran's steel industry has been selected as the case study. Results show that the Iranian mining industry is the best sustainable supplier for Iran's steel industry. In addition, Iran was found as the best sustainable supplier country for most suppliers in Iran's steel industry SC based on the three SC sustainability criteria at three levels. Finally, a sensitivity analysis has been applied according to the different weights of the sustainability criteria. The results of this research can help managers in the steel industry to deal with the supplier selection problem at the macro- level. Furthermore, the presented approach in this research can assist managers of other industries to select and evaluate their suppliers. 1. Introduction Currently, Supply Chain (SC) management is attempting to maintain a long-term cooperation with the suppliers and use fewer, but more reliable, suppliers (Ho et al., 2010). Suppliers are important for every company due to their fundamental role in the success of the companies (Wagner and Johnson, 2004). Supplier selection is one of the most important business activities with a significant effect on the product's quality (Junior et al., 2014). Supplier selection provides a basis for predicting and evaluating the suppliers’ potential for creating a joint relationship (Ha et al., 2011). Basically, supplier selection, as a deci- sion-making process aims to reduce the number of potential suppliers until achieving the final selection (Wu and Barnes, 2011; De Boer et al., 2001). Decisions are based on the evaluation of suppliers by using qualitative and quantitative criteria. Selecting the suppliers might re- quire searching for new suppliers or choosing among the available cases (Junior et al., 2014). Therefore, companies should use an appropriate supplier selection model to determine suitable partners, and consequently maintain their competitive advantages in the globaliza- tion process (Hsu et al., 2013). In recent years, the SC problem has attracted the attention of many researchers. In addition, the method of selecting the suppliers in the SC is a major challenge for the organiza- tions. Furthermore, the interest of the companies and scientific centers in sustainable SC has been increased in recent years. Therefore, the supplier selection process has become one of the key operational tasks for sustainable SC management (Buyuközkan and Çifci, 2011). Due to the increased global awareness about sustainability and governmental orientations in this regard, companies cannot neglect the issue of sus- tainability in business (Govindan et al., 2016a, 2016b; Gaziulusoy, 2015). Sustainable development means a “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future gen- erations to meet their own needs” (Keeble, 1988). This definition of sustainability captured the fundamental intertemporal aspect of human impacts on the natural environment (Guest, 2010). In this context, the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) has been introduced to evaluate the manufacturing performance in three aspects of social, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2018.01.002 Received 7 June 2017; Received in revised form 28 December 2017; Accepted 2 January 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. Permanent address: Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, P.O. Box 76175-133, Kerman, Iran. E-mail addresses: arezoo_219@yahoo.com (A. Azimifard), s.h.moosavirad@uk.ac.ir (S.H. Moosavirad), aria@uk.ac.ir (S. Ariafar). Resources Policy xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0301-4207/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Azimifard, A., Resources Policy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2018.01.002