Vendor selection under uncertain preference among evaluation criteria

In the context of global sourcing, vendor selection is playing an extremely significant role to achieve the strategic goals of supply chain management. The vendor selection problem could be recognized as a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem that uses imprecise and uncertain data. This is because of the fact that the Multiple Criteria vendor selection problem usually proceeds considering both intangible and tangible evaluation factors. Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) denotes a collection of approaches to supporting MCDM problems involving inexact, unknown or in part uncertain inputs. The logic with respect to SMAA is discovering the weight set to determine the preference degrees that make all alternatives achieve the corresponding most-favored position, or guarantee a specified rank for a certain alternative. For the purpose of verifying the usage and effectiveness of applying the SMAA-2 to solve the Multiple Criteria vendor selection problem consider six criteria, namely finance, quality, service, flexibility, partnership and risk.