A New Group Decision Making Method in Supplier Selection for Prototype Generation

In this paper a simple and efficient method is proposed for supplier selection in prototype generation, based on group decision making. Prototype generation is involved with considering lots of uncertain factors that their relative / absolute importance and their internal interactions could not be determined exactly easily. In other words, importance of factors is not clear and also the rating of the potential suppliers is vague by considering each factor. For this reason, the method determines the most effective factors for the selection process by consulting with experts and use of induction guesses. For the conflictionary idea of different experts, opinion aggregation in each step of the method without any losses of ideas. This is done by considering three viewpoints of decision makers when deciding on an arbitrary decision problem with each criterion as: the most optimistic idea, the most common idea, and the most pessimistic idea. The method extracts these three factors from initial decision matrixes and constructs a triangular fuzzy number for both the importance weight of criteria and the ratings of each alternative. In this way, the group decision making problem is transformed to a singular decision making problem. The method is developed and tested via a comprehensive case study in an Iranian company(IPCO) along with a set oftest data.