An Integrated Smartphone and Tariff Plan Selection for Taxi Service Operators: MCDM and RStudio Approach

This paper aims to suggest a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach in the business-to-business context in order to evaluate the smartphone options and tariff plans offered by mobile service providers in respect to the taxi service operators' preference order. With the expert questionnaire filled by decision makers (DMs) of taxi service operating firms and real data collected from heterogeneous data sources, three MCDM techniques are utilized in the selection process: an analytic hierarchy process is utilized to set the relative weights of the smartphone and tariff plan evaluation criteria. Furthermore, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solutions and graph theory and matrix approach (GTMA) are applied to select an ideal smartphone and its relevant tariff plan for taxi service operators. The GTMA weights are obtained by the proposed self-written algorithms in RStudio software. The results show that the most ideal smartphone for taxi service operators is Lenovo A2016 (LTE) offered by Azercell mobile service provider. In addition, the most suitable tariff plan along with the smartphone is “Optimist Talk” with 3000 on-net and 300 off-net minutes, 300 SMS, and the 3000-MB Internet, which costs only 29 AZN per month. This paper fills the gap in the literature that no former studies combined above-mentioned three MCDM techniques to select an ideal smartphone as well as tariff plan, which are offered by mobile service providers. In addition, using three techniques, particularly the R script implementing the dynamic-programming concept to calculate the assessed index scores for GTMA, significantly contribute to DMs in the B2B context to find an ideal solution not only in the mobile service but also in other domains.