A Hesitant Fuzzy TOPSIS model to supplier performance evaluation

Abstract

Supplier performance evaluation is a decision-making problem that involves quantitative and qualitative metrics. Although several models that allow the use of linguistic terms such as "low" and "high" to evaluate suppliers, none of them enables the application of linguistic expressions, which is especially useful when decision makers hesitates to express their evaluations. This study proposes a model based on the Hesitant Fuzzy TOPSIS method to support the supplier performance evaluation. A pilot application was carried out in an automotive company considering 8 suppliers and 10 criteria. When compared to previous similar approaches, the proposed model presented the following advantages: it enables the use of linguistic expressions to assess the supplier performance in each criterion; it groups suppliers with similar levels of performance to develop appropriate management actions; and does not limit the number of criteria and suppliers evaluated.

Keywords

• supplier performance evaluation
• hesitant fuzzy TOPSIS method
• multicriteria decision-making
• supply chain management.