Fuzzy System for Assessment and Mannagement of Attractiveness of Technical or Economic Objects (Case Study of the Selection of a Resource Supplier)

Abstract

Purpose of reseach is to improve the operation of technical systems or performance of socio-economic systems by developing a fuzzy system for selecting a supplier of inventories in logistics companies. The relevance of the study is determined by the absence of a system approach to the formation of a procurement logistics strategy in the overwhelming majority of companies, which makes the operations management of the analysis and evaluation process difficult. When making decisions concerning selecting a supplier, based on the analysis of a variety of sources, various mathematical methods and techniques are used; nevertheless these methods and techniques have a number of drawbacks that do not allow a company to solve the set task with the required effectiveness. Methods. Since the original methods in solving the task of assessing and managing the attractiveness of an object are incomplete and noе clear, the method applied is based on the systems of fuzzy logic inference. The basis of the proposed method is a scheme of the direct fuzzy inference. It is modified by introducing an ordered weighted averaging operator to aggregate the outputs of the production rules. At the first stage of the derivation, the membership functions defined for the input variables are applied to their actual values for the subsequent determination of the degree of truth for each premise of each rule. Then, the calculated truth value for the premises of each rule is applied to the inferences of each rule. This leads to the formation of a fuzzy subset, which is assigned to each output variable for each rule. As a rule of logic inference, we use min operation. At the next stage, the fuzzy value of the membership function of the output variable of each rule is reduced to a crisp type by applying the fast centroid method. To aggregate the output of each production rule, taking into account the degree of their importance for the decision-maker, it is proposed to use the Ronald R. Yager’s ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator. Results. Ordered weighted averaging and the subsequent ranking of the pairs of alternative firms made it possible to create a list of supplying companies corresponding to the objective ranking. Conclusion. A model verification of the ranking of suppliers of packaging materials for the firms of finished products was performed. The results of an experimental study demonstrate the prospects of the proposed approach taking into account the mutual influence of the indicators.