Multicriteria Selection of the Building Material Supplier Using AHP and Fuzzy AHP

Abstract

When selecting a building material supplier, contractors may take into consideration a large number of criteria that are often subjective and hard to measure. Including them all in the evaluation may be beneficial, yet in practice it may generate many complications. A solution is provided by one of the multicriteria analysis methods. The article describes the criteria employed in the evaluation of building material suppliers. One multicriteria analysis method, namely the analytic hierarchical process (AHP), is argued to be a useful alternative. An example of its application involving its basic and the more sophisticated variant, the fuzzy analytic hierarchical process (FAHP) with extent analysis method, is presented. As the results reveal, real decisive problems require methods resembling human reasoning, which is often characterized by uncertainty and subjectivity of evaluation. The real problem presented in the paper proves that the FAHP method may have a practical application.