Evaluating suppliers via a multiple levels multiple criteria decision making method under fuzzy environment

Suppliers are an important component of the supply chain. Their ability and performance are what largely determine the success or failure of the supply chain. Thus the evaluation of suppliers has become a very important part of the supply chain management of a company. This paper suggests a multiple levels multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) model under fuzzy environment to evaluate and select suppliers, where a general hierarchical structure is developed to depict the relationship among parent criteria and their sub-criteria and sub-sub-criteria and so on. These criteria are classified into quantitative and qualitative ones. The ratings of alternatives versus qualitative criteria and the importance weights of all criteria in the hierarchical structure are assessed in linguistic values represented by triangular fuzzy numbers. The ranking approach of center of area is suggested to rank all the fuzzy numbers before their weighted ratings aggregation. The final evaluation values of alternatives can then be obtained through the additive weighted ratings from the last to the first level in the criteria structure. Finally a numerical example demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed model. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.