A new fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and its application to vendor selection problem

Vendor selection problem has been studied plenty of times and many decision making methodologies have been proposed to overcome the problem. Nature of vendor selection is a complex multicriteria problem including both quantitative and qualitative factors. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new simplified fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) approach for tackling this problem. The approach enables multiple experts on evaluation and uses a new triangular fuzzy scale containing also negative fuzzy numbers to establish fuzzy comparison decision matrices. It uses a very easy normalization formula to get importance weights of attributes. It yields final importance weights by triangular fuzzy numbers without any defuzzification. At the final stage, an area-based ranking method is used for ranking the alternatives. To demonstrate the proposed methodology, a case study in a computer seller firm is given. The results are compared with some other fuzzy AHP methodologies. The results indicate that the vendor selection problem can be tackled by using the proposed methodology effectively.