Determination of Quality Value of Cotton Fiber Using Integrated Best-Worst Method-Revised Analytic Hierarchy Process

Selection of cotton fibers in terms of their quality value has created a domain of emerging interest among the researchers. In this study, a newly developed Best-Worst Method (BWM) was integrated with Revised Analytic Hierarchy Process (RAHP) to rank cotton fiber lots on the basis of six apposite fiber properties namely fiber bundle tenacity, elongation, micronaire, upper half mean length, uniformity index, and short fiber index. Ranking performance of this integrated approach closely resembles those of the other multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches. No occurrence of rank reversal during the sensitivity analyses corroborates the stability and robustness of the BWM-RAHP method. Uniqueness of the present study lies in the fact that this is the maiden application of the vector-based BWM approach, that uses fewer pairwise comparisons than other variants of MCDM, in a cotton fiber grading problem. The RAHP adds value to the decision model by overcoming the problem of ranking inconsistency. Rank correlations between the ranking based on quality value of cotton and those based on yarn tenacity are also encouraging, and further bolster the efficacy of the BWM-RAHP method.