Multicriteria supplier selection using acceptability analysis

Abstract

The supplier selection problem has been largely explored in the extant literature and attracted considerable attention of academics and purchasing managers. Practical supplier selection problem is usually revolved around multicriteria and a committee of experts. However, even using the exact values of the input data, certain experts may generate uncertain evaluation results on a supplier, because the exact weights with respect to each criterion are extremely difficult to reach a group consensus. In this article, first the interval data to describe all experts’ evaluation on all suppliers are formulated and then a stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA-2) is applied to provide a full rank of all candidate suppliers. SMAA-2 method is considered as an effective instrument to deal with stochastic decision-making problems. The rank acceptability indices and holistic rank indices are obtained to support the supplier selection. A numerical example drawn from the previous paper is recalculated to show the effectiveness of our approach.