Using improved CRITIC method to evaluate thermal coal suppliers

Nowadays the complex international political situation has caused the shortage of coal supply in the European region. Scholars have done a lot of research on supplier evaluation. However, these studies don’t reflect the variability of the indicators, such as interruption caused by recent war. Coal-electricity-integrated companies have a large demand for thermal coal and high requirements for stable supply, so they need to conduct timely and effective short-term evaluation of suppliers. This paper improves the CRITIC method and uses short-term transaction data for a coal-electricity-integrated firm to evaluate its coal suppliers. The results show that the improved CRITIC method effectively avoids the problem of weight changes caused by conflicting value ranges of indicators, and its evaluation results are more consistent with the actual situation, which can meet the requirements of large coal enterprises for evaluating suppliers.