Designing a decision support system to evaluate and select suppliers using fuzzy analytic network process

Recent information and communication developments caused that global organizations spread out their markets throughout the world. In this environment, local exclusive markets have been replaced with global competitive ones. Therefore, organizations must concentrate on their main operations to survive in such an environment. To do so, managers have intended to cooperate with some financial partners in long-term relations. In this paper, the aim is to develop a fuzzy analytic network process (ANP) model to evaluate the potential suppliers and select the best one(s) with respect to the vendor important factors. Additionally, ANP is developed by fuzzy sets theory to cover the indeterminacy of decisions made in this field. The authors have augmented the model with a non-linear programming model to elicit eigenvectors from fuzzy comparison matrices. Hybridization of these two concepts can model supplier selection problem in all circumstances and reaches the optimal choice. Finally, a numerical sample is used to validate the proposed model. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.