Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process and Its Application to E-Marketplace Selection

Abstract

Making decisions is a part of daily life. The nature of decision-making includes multiple and usually conflicting criteria. Multi Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) problems are handled under two main headings: Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) and Multi Objective Decision Making (MODM). Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a widely used multi-criteria decision making approach and has successfully been applied to many practical problems. Traditional AHP requires exact or crisp judgments (numbers). However, due to the complexity and uncertainty involved in real world decision problems, decision makers might be more reluctant to provide crisp judgments than fuzzy ones. Furthermore, even when people use the same words, individual judgments of events are invariably subjective, and the interpretations that they attach to the same words may differ. This is why fuzzy numbers and fuzzy sets have been introduced to characterize linguistic variables. Here, the authors overview the most known fuzzy AHP approaches and their application, and they present a case study to select an e-marketplace for a firm, which produces and sells electronic parts of computers in Turkey.