Intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations and their application in supplier selection

Supplier selection, the process of finding the right suppliers who are able to provide the buyer with the right quality products and/or services at the right price, at the right time and in the right quantities, is one of the most critical activities for establishing an effective supply chain. On the other hand, it is a hard problem since supplier selection is typically a multi criteria group decision-making problem involving several conflicting criteria on which decision maker?s knowledge is usually vague and uncertain. In the process of multi criteria group decision-making, an intuitionistic fuzzy preference relation (or called intuitionistic preference relation, intuitionistic pairwise comparison matrix, intuitionistic judgment matrix) is a powerful tool to reflect decision maker?s knowledge about the problem domain because of taking into consideration his/her vague and uncertain knowledge. However, in intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations, there are some problems such as testing whether an intuitionistic fuzzy preference relation is consistent or not, deriving the priority vector of a consistent intuitionistic preference relation, estimating the missing values of an incomplete intuitionistic preference relation, etc. The main research objective of this thesis work is to solve these issues. To accomplish this, we firstly introduce the concept of multiplicative transitivity of intuitionistic fuzzy preference relation. Next, based on this concept, we introduce some approaches to solve the above problems. Finally, we show that intuitionistic preference relations may be used for selecting appropriate supplier in the process of supplier selection.