Supplier Selection Using a Group Multi-criteria Ordinal Sorting Procedure

Supplier selection is believed to be a vital issue for companies in a supply chain and it is in essence a multi-criteria group decision-making problem (MCGDM). However, almost all the supplier selection models published were based on single-person decision-making and laid less emphasis on ordinal data. A MCGDM method is developed for supplier selection with rankings of alternatives given by decision makers in respect to each criteria considered. For each decision maker, at first, the ordinal preferences of the alternatives with respect to every criteria were integrated into the comprehensive rankings of them by 0-1 programming considering criteria weights. Then the integrated rankings of the alternatives for every individual decision maker were aggregated into the final rankings of them for the group by 0-1 programming again after the importances of decision makers were taken into account. A supplier selection case and some discussions on the results show the proposed method is effective and simple in computation. This study extends Bernardo's method for multi-criteria decision-making to MCGDM problem.