A Model for Strategic Vendor Selection under Fuzzy Environment

During recent years, how to determine suitable suppliers in the supply chain has become a key strategic consideration. However, the nature of these decisions usually is complex and unstructured. (1)It involves an evaluation of multiple attributes, and moreover qualitative attributes are often accompanied by certain ambiguities and vagueness. (2) One drawback of the widely used approaches is the assumption of independency among various criteria of decision-making. In this article, a fuzzy ANP approach was proposed to overcome the vagueness in preferences and the improper assumption of independency among various criteria. The method adopted uses triangular fuzzy numbers for pair-wise comparison and applies extent analysis to determine the weights for various attributes. An illustrative example is used to explore the application of the fuzzy ANP methodology to this problem.