AN INTERVAL-VALUED FUZZY NUMBER APPROACH FOR SUPPLIER SELECTION

Abstract

Supplier assessment in supply chain management and electronic marketplaces plays an important role in the business transaction. Many methods have been proposed to deal with the supplier selection problems. Some of them are based on fuzzy set theory. However, traditional fuzzy numbers cannot precisely express the vagueness in the decision process. In this paper, we are going to propose a new fuzzy multiple criteria decision making model based on interval-valued fuzzy numbers to tackle the supplier selection problem in the circumstances where uncertainty is introduced. Usually, fuzzy numbers are employed to express uncertainty. For a fuzzy number, the degree of the membership is a crisp number whereas the degree of the membership for an interval-valued fuzzy number is an interval. To grasp the vagueness more precisely, we employ interval-valued fuzzy numbers to represent the ratings and weights of the evaluation instead of traditional fuzzy numbers. One of the merits of our method compared to the traditional fuzzy methods is that our method can express the uncertainty more precisely in the evaluation process. Beside, we propose a new ranking method for intervalvalued fuzzy numbers.