Research On Multi-criteria Decision-making Methods With Heterogeneous Information And Its Application In Supplier Evaluation And Selection

Multi-criteria decision making is an important branch of management science research.The essence of multi-criteria decision-making is that decision makers make use of the existing decision information to sort a set of alternatives in a certain way based on multiple conflicting and contradictory criteria.With the development of economy and society,the complexity of multi-criteria decision-making issues and the uncertainty of decision-making environment are constantly increasing.Due to the increasing complexity,uncertainty and ambiguity of human cognition under uncertain conditions,fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method based on fuzzy decision information and its application have attracted the attention of researchers,and fruitful research results have been achived.The fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method is helpful for solving multi-criteria decision-making problems in uncertain or fuzzy decisionmaking situations in production and life.In order to improve the scientificity and practicability of this kind of decision-making,more and more uncertain or fuzzy information is being modeled in the decision-making framework.For some fuzzy multi-criteria decision problems,according to the characteristics of the criteria and other uncertain factors,the evaluation values on different criteria should be represented by their appropriate information types,which is more reasonable and flexible.Although various multi-criteria decision-making methods based on different fuzzy information have been proposed,the research on multi-criteria decision making with heterogeneous information with different decision characteristics is insufficient.Supplier evaluation and selection is an important application area of fuzzy multi-criteria decision theory.The quality of suppliers is a key factor in determining the competitiveness of the supply chain.Therefore,it is very important to choose the most suitable supplier.Due to the increasing uncertainty of the competitive environment and the complexity of the business environment,decision makers need to consider more and more uncertain factors in the supplier evaluation and selection process,which makes it a typical fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making problem.How to describe the uncertainties and vague factors scientifically and reasonably in such decisions is the key to solve such problems.In this paper,the fuzzy multi-criteria decisionmaking method under uncertain conditions with different decision features and its application in supplier evaluation and selection are studied.The main work and innovations are as follows:Firstly,a multi-criteria group decision-making framework with incomplete heterogeneous information based on generalized VIKOR is established to solve a more reasonable and acceptable compromise solution in the context of emergency heterogeneous fuzzy decisionmaking,and it is applied to the emergency supplier selection problem.The decision-making framework fully considers the characteristics of heterogeneous decision-making information,and gives a method of using existing information to supplement incomplete heterogeneous information in emergency situations.In this paper,the classical VIKOR is extended to the generalized VIKOR based on normalized distance,which is helpful to deal with multi-criteria heterogeneous information more flexibly in emergency decision-making context.Time and information are limited in emergency decision-making situations,it is more flexible and reasonable that evaluation values on different criteria can be represented by their appropriate information types.Experts can express their preferences more fully according to their preferred information types,thus improving efficiency and quality of decision making.In addition,in order to deal with heterogeneous aggregated information more reasonably,this paper improves and expands the distance measure and priority comparison method of some types of information sets,so that it contains more uncertain or fuzzy information,reflects decision characteristics more fully,and improves its applicability.A distance measurement method based on 2-tuple linguistic approach and an improved priority comparison method for hesitant fuzzy linguistic terms sets are proposed.The new methods expand the discrete space to the continuous space and has better applicability in dealing with clustering collective information.Secondly,from the perspective of multi-criteria distance measurement,the fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method with interaction among criteria is studied.In this paper,we define a multi-criteria distance measurement,namely Choquet integral distance metric,which considers the interaction among criteria.Based on the defined Choquet integral distance measure,two multi-criteria decision-making frameworks with different decision information characteristics considering the interaction among criteria are established and applied to the sustainable supplier selection problem with different decision information characteristics.Firstly,a multi-criteria decision-making method based on Choquet integral distance measure in single decision information context is proposed and applied to the sustainable supplier selection problem with specific decision information characteristics.Secondly,a multi-criteria decision-making framework based on heterogeneous information considering the interaction among criteria is established from the perspective of multi-criteria distance measure,and applied to the sustainable supplier selection with heterogeneous information.Establishing decision criteria sets of which the criteria are independent to each other may be difficult in some decisionmaking situations,such as for sustainable supplier selection issues which needs to consider technical,economic and social factors at the same time.There is a great possibility of interaction between these indicators.This paper provides a new way to solve the problem of multi-criteria decision-making with interaction among criteria from the perspective of multi-criteria distance measurement.It is more suitable for solving the problem of fuzzy multi-criteria decisionmaking in which the evaluation values of different criteria can not be aggregated directly or effectively.Finally,a reference point-assisted fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method with heterogeneous information is proposed and applied to supplier evaluation.In highly uncertain or ambiguous decision-making situations,decision makers often need to use reference products or solutions to make decisions.In this paper,reference-dependent utility is introduced into heterogeneous information decision-making framework.Precise data,various fuzzy information and probability information are integrated into one decision-making framework,and normalized gain and loss utility matrice is established to ensure the computational compatibility of accurate,fuzzy and uncertain evaluations with different scales on each criteria.In order to fully consider the characteristics of heterogeneous information and its role in heterogeneous decision matrix,reliability is defined and introduced to characterize the impact of reliability of different types of information set on decision results.The use of reference points to assist decision-makers can effectively deal with the contradiction between the huge amount of data in limited time and the limited data collection and processing ability of decision-makers,and can consider the psychological utility of decision-makers.