Evaluating Consulting Firms Using a Centroid Ranking Approach based Fuzzy MCDM Method

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and select consulting firms by suggesting a centroid ranking approach based fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) method, where ratings of alternatives versus qualitative criteria and the different importance weights among criteria are assessed in linguistic values represented by fuzzy numbers. Criteria are categorized to qualitative, benefit quantitative and cost quantitative ones. Membership functions of the final fuzzy evaluation values can be developed through a-cuts and interval arithmetic. The ranking approach of Euclidean distance based on centroid points is applied to determine the ranking order of all alternatives. Formulas for the ranking procedure can be clearly derived. Finally, a numerical example is used to demonstrate the computational process of the suggested model.