Multi-criteria decision making with fuzzy analytic network process and a business application

Decision making problems are tried to be solved according to predetermined objectives and constraints. During the development of the solution model, beside these objectives and constraints, the type of variables (qualitative or quantitative), and/or the properties of data (deterministic, stochastic, fuzzy) directly affect the construction of the model. Gaining the quantitative data for decision making problems may not be possible. Therefore, only the qualitative data are had to be considered within decision making process. Then, the data are taken into consideration as heuristically or linguistically. Another problem is to make a decision by considering many interactive factors. Analytic network process (ANP) is a technique which finds the most appropriate alternative in the multicriteria decision problems that have many options. During the solving process, the importance levels of the criteria are obtained. In this study, Fuzzy Analytic Network Process (FANP) method is developed in order to solve the multi criteria decision making problems by taking into consideration the mutual interactions of the criteria in the place where the data can be expressed as fuzzy. The successfull results are found out from the viewpoint of the company by applying of the developed method in a facility location selection problem raising in real business world.