The assessment and selection of suppliers using AHP and MABAC with type-2 fuzzy numbers in automotive industry

The selection of appropriate suppliers in an uncertain environment influences the sustainability and the competitive advantage of the automotive industry and hence presents one of the significant management problems. In the literature, it is suggested that an acceptable supplier may be determined concerning many criteria. In this manuscript, criteria selection is based on the relevant literature. Handling of different uncertainties is performed by using the type-2 fuzzy sets that have the capability of handling more considered impreciseness and uncertainties. In the presented research, the two-state model is proposed. In the first stage, the relative importance of criteria and sub-criteria are described by pre-defined linguistic expressions which are modeled by the interval type-2 triangular fuzzy numbers (IT2TFNs). The fuzzy weights vectors are given by using the fuzzy Analytic Hierarchical Process with IT2TFNs (IT2FAHP). After that, the ranking of suppliers is based on the modified Multi-Attributive Border Approximation area Comparison method (MABAC) with IT2TFNs (IT2FMABAC). The extension of the conventional MABAC includes: (a) modeling of sub-criteria values of IT2TFNs, (b) the fuzzy criteria values are calculated by using fuzzy algebra rules, (c) belonging of each supplier to border approximation areas (BAAs) is given by using procedure, and (d) the distance of suppliers to BAAs is determined by using the normalized Euclidean distance formulas. The proposed model is tested on the real-life data from the automotive supply chain. Through the presented research, it is shown that the proposed IT2FMABAC is a useful and reliable tool for the rational purchasing decision-making process.