Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Supplier Selection
Summary
Supplier selection is a critical strategic task that balances cost, quality, delivery reliability, sustainability and risk. Traditional multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques often struggle with the subjective judgements and linguistic assessments inherent in expert evaluations. Fuzzy MCDM introduces fuzzy set theory to model uncertainty and imprecision in both criteria weighting and performance ratings. In a typical fuzzy supplier selection framework, decision makers first define a hierarchy of relevant criteria—financial strength, production capacity, environmental compliance, logistical performance and innovation potential. Experts then express their assessments using linguistic terms which are mapped to fuzzy numbers (often triangular or trapezoidal). These fuzzy inputs are aggregated via methods such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP), technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) or ELECTRE III, sometimes in hybrid models. Interactions among criteria can be captured by advanced operators like the Choquet integral or by network processes. The final fuzzy ranking is defuzzified to yield a crisp supplier priority list. Such approaches accommodate incomplete weight information, support group decision making and allow sensitivity analysis, making them widely adopted in manufacturing, construction, automotive and high‐tech supply chains worldwide.
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Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Supplier Selection publication trend
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Technical terms
Fuzzy MCDM: A decision framework integrating fuzzy set theory into multi‐criteria analysis to handle vagueness in expert judgments.
Triangular/Trapezoidal Fuzzy Number: A fuzzy quantity defined by three or four points representing the core and support of vague linguistic terms.
AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process): A pairwise comparison method for deriving ratio scales of criteria importance from expert judgments.
VIKOR: A compromise ranking method focusing on the closest solution to the ideal, balancing group utility and individual regret.
Choquet Integral: An aggregation operator that accounts for interactions among criteria by using capacities instead of additive weights.
ELECTRE III: An outranking method that compares alternatives by concordance and discordance measures to establish preference relations.
References
- Methods for selecting the best partner construction enterprise in terms of partnering relations. Journal of Civil Engineering and Management (2010).
- Interval‐Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Multicriteria Group Decision Making Based on VIKOR and Choquet Integral. Journal of Applied Mathematics (2013).
- A Trapezoidal Fuzzy Number-Based VIKOR Method with Completely Unknown Weight Information. Symmetry (2023).
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