Multi-criteria group decision-making approach based on group’s ideal solution and minimum deviation to strategic vendor selection

Traditional, vendor selection models are based on cardinal data and single-person decision-making with less emphasis on ordinal data and group decision-making. A multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) approach based on group’s ideal solution and minimum deviation was proposed for vendor selection. First, the concept of group’s ideal solution was presented under ordinal preferences and thus the rankings of alternatives under each criteria were obtained. According to the idea that the weighted deviation between the integrative rankings of alternatives and the ones of them under each criteria, then, the final rankings of them were derived by solving a nonlinear integer programming transformed into an assignment problem. An illustrative example and some comparisons and discussions on the results were provided to indicate the proposed method is practical and effective. In addition, this paper have extended the technique for preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to MCGDM with ordinal preferences and generalized Cook-Seiford social selection function to MCGDM with weights of criteria and decision makers.