A New Methodology of Multicriteria Decision-Making in Supplier Selection Based on Z-Numbers

Supplier selection is a significant issue of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM), which has been heavily studied with classical fuzzy methodologies, but the reliability of the knowledge from domain experts is not efficiently taken into consideration. Z-number introduced by Zadeh has more power to describe the knowledge of human being with uncertain information considering both restraint and reliability. In this paper, a methodology for supplier selection using Z-numbers is proposed considering information transformation. It includes two parts: one solves the issue of how to convert Z-number to the classic fuzzy number according to the fuzzy expectation; the other solves the problem of how to get the optimal priority weight for supplier selection with genetic algorithm (GA), which is an efficient and flexible method for calculating the priority weight of the judgement matrix. Finally, an example for supplier selection is used to illustrate the effectiveness the proposed methodology.