Improvement of the supply risk assessment of foreign suppliers by utilizing fuzzy preference relations

Potential supplier selection has been essential for manufactories to ensure the smooth operation of the production process. Reuven [16] used the analytical hierarchical process to rank three foreign suppliers based on four criteria of supply risk assessment. The analytical hierarchical process uses n(n-1)/2 judgments in a preference matrix with n attributes, while the consistent fuzzy preference relations approach can yield a consistent decision ranking from only n-1 judgments in pairwise comparison, and thus is deemed executing faster and more efficient than the analytical hierarchical process approach.