A fuzzy analytical hierarchy process approach for prioritising the buyers in selling by-product of a sugar plant

World sugar market is not healthier because of higher production cost and lower selling price of sugar. Efforts have been taken to elucidate this while remedies include improving the revenues of sugar plant from selling of sugarcane by‐products like molasses. Buyer selection and prioritisation is very complex since it involves quantitative and qualitative multi‐criterion. In most of the real time problems, some of the decisions can be exactly assessed while others cannot. Essentially, the uncertainty in the preference judgements gives rise to uncertainty in ranking of alternatives in selecting the appropriate buyer. In this paper, a fuzzy analytical hierarchy process‐based (FAHP) buyer selection model has been formulated and implemented in a sugar plant in Tamilnadu, India. The fuzziness of the decision maker for dealing with complex decisions involving multiple criteria in systems of many levels is considered here. The main and sub‐criteria influencing the buyer selection are identified for structuring the FAHP model and finally the buyers were prioritised. The results exhibit the prioritised buyer and other alternatives.