Analytic network approach for selecting suppliers considering different cooperation patterns

This paper aims to examine the weights of criteria and identify the choice of cooperation patterns simultaneously while evaluating and selecting suppliers for a manufacturing company. While the weighting process for the criteria is affected by the cooperation pattern that the company intends to pursue, the cooperation patterns are also affected by the emphasis on some specific criteria. The analytic network process that draws support from the concept of the Markov process is used to manipulate the interdependence situation. The decision-maker becomes aware of the choice of cooperation patterns with the suppliers by analyzing the weighting process for the criteria in the supplier selection process. It is different from the general way of determining the cooperation pattern subjectively. This also gives the decision-maker a chance to examine his previous decision. A numerical example has been used to verify the effectiveness of the approach. Although, in our example, only a single evaluator is involved in the evaluation process, the proposed approach is still applicable to the situation of multi-evaluators provided that data have been preprocessed appropriately.