Supplier Selection Using an Integrated Decision Making Approach Based on QFD and 2-Tuple Fuzzy Representation

Considering its need to trade-off multiple criteria exhibiting vagueness and imprecision, supplier selection is an important multi-criteria decision making problem. Vague and imprecise judgments inherent in numerous features of supplier selection call for using linguistic assessments rather than exact numerical values. In this paper, a novel fuzzy multi-criteria group decision making approach using the quality function deployment (QFD) concept, fusion of fuzzy information and 2-tuple linguistic representation model is developed for supplier selection. The proposed fuzzy decision making approach employs ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator and the aggregation process is based on combining information by means of fuzzy sets on a basic linguistic term set (BLTS). Then, the collective performance values are transformed into linguistic 2-tuples to rectify the problem of loss of information encountered using other linguistic approaches. The computational procedure of the proposed framework is illustrated through a supplier selection problem reported in an earlier study.