A Decision Making Model for Outsourcing of Manufacturing Activities by ANP and DEMATEL Under Fuzzy Environment

Decision making about outsourcing or insourcing of manufacturing activities is a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem, which requires considering many quantitative and qualitative factors as evaluative criteria simultaneously. Therefore, a suitable MCDM method could be useful in this area, take into account the interactions between quantitative and qualitative criteria. The analytic network process (ANP) is a relatively new MCDM method which can deal with different kinds of interactions systematically. Moreover, the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method is able to convert the cause and effect relations between of the criteria into a visual structural model as well as handling the inner dependences within a set of criteria. However both ANP method and DEMATEL techniques in their original forms are incapable to capture the uncertainty during value judgment elicitation. To overcome this problem, here, a new and effective model is proposed based on combining fuzzy ANP and fuzzy DEMATEL for decision making about outsourcing or insourcing of manufacturing activities in uncertain conditions. Data from a case study is used to illustrate the usefulness and applicability of the proposed method.