| Abstract: | More attention has been drawn to the selection of contractors in recent years,but little research has been conducted on distinguishing representation of performance values for qualitative and quantitative criteria in one decision-making(DM) problem yet.Thus a novel method based on fuzzy number is proposed to solve the representation issue,in which linguistic terms and fuzzy memberships are used to separately describe qualitative and quantitative criteria,and then the linguistic terms are translated into fuzzy numbers which will be defuzzified and unified with fuzzy memberships.The novel method is used to develop a synthetic decision model for selection of contractors.The model is developed to verify the feasibility of the novel method,which(1) builds a twolevel criteria system based on survey and literature summary;(2)utilizes the analytic network process(ANP) to determine criteria weights;(3) uses the novel method to make different representations of performance values for qualitative and quantitative criteria in one DM problem and then unifies different representations for decision matrices;(4) utilizes three multi-criteria decision-making(MCDM) methods containing simple additive weighting(SAW),technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution(TOPSIS) and complex proportional assessment(COPRAS) to deal with decision matrices.Besides,a case of contractor selection is given to check the novel method by applying developed model,and the case results show that the novel method can suitably solve the representation issue of the performance values for two types of criteria as well as simplify the processes of TOPSIS and COPRAS. |
