Decision-making in fuzzy environment

Abstract

Decision-making is a logical human judgment process for identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and preferences of the decision maker that mostly applied in the managerial level of the concerned department of the organization/ supply chain. Recently, decision-making has gained immense popularity in industries because of their global competitiveness and to survive successfully in respective marketplace.Therefore, decision-making plays a vital role especially in purchase department for reducing material costs, minimizing production time as well as improving the quality of product or service. But, in today’s real life problems, decision-makers generally face lot of confusions, ambiguity due to the involvement of uncertainty and subjectivity in complex evaluating criterions of alternatives. To deal such kind of vagueness in human thought the title ‘Decision-Making in Fuzzy Environment’ has focused into the emerging area of research associated with decision sciences. Multiple and conflicting objectives such as ‘minimize cost’ and ‘maximize quality of service’ are the real stuff of the decision-makers’ daily concerns. Keeping this in mind, this thesis introduces innovative decision aid methodologies for an evaluation cum selection policy analysis, based on theory of multi criteria decision-making tools and fuzzy set theory.
In the supplier selection policy, emphasis is placed on compromise solution towards the selection of best supplier among a set of alternative candidate suppliers. The nature of supplier selection process is a complex multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problem which deals with both quantitative and qualitative factors may be conflicting in nature as well as contain incomplete and uncertain information. Therefore, an application of VIKOR method combined with fuzzy logic has been reported as an efficient approach to support decision-making in supplier selection problems. This dissertation also proposes an integrated model for industrial robot selection considering both objective and subjective criteria’s. The concept of Interval-Valued Fuzzy Numbers (IVFNs) combined with VIKOR method has been adapted in this analysis.