An Evaluation Model of Green Coal Supplier for Thermal Power Supply Chain Based on PCA-SVM

A thermal power supply chain differs from other supply chains in terms of supplier selection, materials transportation, products marketing, and so on. Therefore, the green coal supplier evaluation model has its own characteristics. Although many methods have been developed to solve the green supplier evaluation problem, little is known about how to evaluate the green coal supplier in the thermal power supply chain. To overcome this drawback, an evaluation index system for the green coal supplier is established, and new indexes such as price based on calorific value, quality indexes based on the designed coal type, and transportation indexes such as transportation carbon footprint and environment indexes are created according to the characteristic of the thermal power supply chain. Then, principal component analysis (PCA) is used to create the main evaluation indexes, and the support vector machine (SVM) is adopted for the evaluation model. Finally, a practical example is applied to show that the model established in this paper outperforms others in evaluation accuracy.