Shadowed AHP for multi-criteria supplier selection
This work addresses supplier selection in business decision-making by providing a method to handle multi-granular uncertain information, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing AHP and fuzzy number techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of handling multi-granular linguistic information in multi-criteria supplier selection using the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) by proposing a novel Shadowed AHP method based on shadowed fuzzy numbers, which converts diverse uncertain preference values into a unified model and introduces a new ranking approach, applied to a supplier selection case.
Numerous techniques of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) have been proposed in a variety of business domains. One of the well-known methods is the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP). Various uncertain numbers are commonly used to represent preference values in AHP problems. In the case of multi-granularity linguistic information, several methods have been proposed to address this type of AHP problem. This paper introduces a novel method to solve this problem using shadowed fuzzy numbers (SFNs). These numbers are characterized by approximating different types of fuzzy numbers and preserving their uncertainty properties. The new Shadowed AHP method is proposed to handle preference values which are represented by multi-types of uncertain numbers. The new approach converts multi-granular preference values into unified model of shadowed fuzzy numbers and utilizes their properties. A new ranking approach is introduced to order the results of aggregation preferences. The new approach is applied to solve a supplier selection problem in which multi-granular information are used. The features of the new approach are significant for decision-making applications.