Supplier selection using AHP methodology extended by D numbers

Supplier selection is an important issue in supply chain management (SCM), and essentially is a multi-criteria decision-making problem. Supplier selection highly depends on experts’ assessments. In the process of that, it inevitably involves various types of uncertainty such as imprecision, fuzziness and incompleteness due to the inability of human being’s subjective judgment. However, the existing methods cannot adequately handle these types of uncertainties. In this paper, based on a new effective and feasible representation of uncertain information, called D numbers, a D-AHP method is proposed for the supplier selection problem, which extends the classical analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. Within the proposed method, D numbers extended fuzzy preference relation has been involved to represent the decision matrix of pairwise comparisons given by experts. An illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.