A group decision-making model for multi-criteria supplier selection in the presence of ordinal data

Supplier selection is increasingly becoming a strategic issue for companies in supply chains and it is usually made by multiple decision makers according to multiple criteria. However, almost all the supplier selection models are based on single-person decision-making and lay less emphasis on ordinal data. So a multi-criteria group decision-making method is developed for supplier selection with ordinal preferences of alternatives given by decision makers in respect to each criteria considered. At first, the individual ordinal preferences of the alternatives under each criteria were aggregated to the rankings of them for the group by 0-1 programming considering the weights of decision makers. Then the final rankings of the alternatives were derived from the group rankings of them above by 0-1 programming again after the criteria weights were taken into account. An illustrative case and some discussions show the proposed method is effective and simple in computation. This study extends Bernardo's method for multi-criteria decision-making to multi-criteria group decision-making considering the weights of criteria and decision makers with respect to each criteria.