An application of fuzzy TOPSIS method in an SWOT analysis

Analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) is amethod to formulate the strategy. Although the SWOT analysis successfully providesthe key factors of the problem, it has some drawbacks in selecting appropriatestrategy for the evaluation and final decision steps. During recent years, somemultiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques such as analytic hierarchyprocess (AHP) and analytic network process (ANP) remove some of these deficiencies,but the nature of these decision usually is very complex and using crisp datais not suitable. In this paper, linguistic variable represented with fuzzy numbersare used to assess the ratings and weights. Then, a MCDM model based on fuzzysets theory is proposed to handle the strategy selection problem with imprecisedata. According to the concept of the TOPSIS in multiple-criteria group decisionmaking(MCGDM) problem, an index of closeness coefficient (CC) is defined todetermine the ranking order of all strategies by calculating the distance to the bothfuzzy ideal solution and fuzzy anti-ideal solution based on approach of ordering ofthe fuzzy numbers simultaneously. Finally, an example is given to highlight theprocedure of the proposed method.