M. H. Fazel Zarandi - Department of Industrial Engineering Amirkabir University of Technology Tehran, Iran
Sanaz Shoarinejad - Department of Industrial Engineering Amirkabir University of Technology Tehran, Iran
Solmaz Ghazanfar Ahari - Department of Industrial Engineering Amirkabir University of Technology Tehran, Iran

In today’s competitive world, one of the most important processes performed in organizations is the evaluation, selection and continuous assessment of suppliers to support their supply chains. Supplier selection process is a multi-criteria decision making problem, which includes both qualitative and quantitative criteria. Nowadays standardization regulations such as ISO binds companies to audit their current suppliers. Therefore, there is a database of supplier's performance in most of organizations. This historical data is one of major sources for evaluating potential vendors. In this paper, C4.5 algorithm is applied to generate a decision tree and rule set for an inductive frame based supplier selection expert system, which can be effectively used to help managers in making proper decisions about their suppliers based on previous proceedings and results.

Supplier selection, frame based expert system, induction system, C4.5 algorithm