A New Comprehensive Approach for Efficient Road Vehicle Procurement Using Hybrid DANP-TOPSIS Method

The efficient vehicle procurement is an important business segment of different companies with their own vehicle fleet. It has a significant influence on reducing transport and maintenance costs and on increasing the fleet's energy efficiency. It is indispensable that managers consider various criteria from several aspects when procuring a vehicle. In that sense, we defined 13 relevant criteria and divided them into four multidisciplinary aspects: Construction-technical, financial, operational, and environmental. Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory-Based Analytic Network Process (DANP) method was applied to evaluate the significance of defined criteria and aspects and their interdependency. It is established that the three most important criteria for vehicle procurement are vehicle price, vehicle maintenance, and vehicle selling price. The most important aspect is construction technical aspect, while the aspect of the environment is the least important. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method was used to rank eight different vehicles, which were considered by vehicle fleet manager at the observed company. This model assists fleet managers in the selection of the most suitable vehicle for procurement, while significantly reducing decision-making time and simultaneously observing all necessary criteria and their weights. Moreover, we have considered 10 different scenarios to establish whether and how the rank of the observed alternatives would change.