A New Criteria Importance Assessment (CIMAS) Method in Multi-Criteria Group Decision-Making: Criteria Evaluation for Supplier Selection

Abstract

Decision-making is a challenging task for logistics managers when solving the supplier selection problem. It is usually affected by numerous conflicting criteria that are not equally important to all decision-makers. Criteria evaluation is one of the crucial parts here. The primary purpose of this paper is to propose a novel integrated criteria importance assessment method based on objective judgment and group decision-making. The developed method is applied to the criteria importance evaluation for supplier selection. First, we proposed the criteria importance assessment (CIMAS) method based on the expert's opinion, where the years of experts' experience were given in the form of an expert's weight. Second, the obtained criteria weights are further integrated within the well-known CRITIC method, and the hybrid criteria weights are determined. The input data matrix is based on the experts' criteria evaluation on the one-to-ten-point scale. The data were further analyzed by the novel CIMAS method and were utilized within the CRITIC (objective) method. The paper's main contribution is the proposal of the novel CIMAS method. Another contribution is coupling the subjective (CIMAS) and the objective (CRITIC) methods. The results reveal that the most important criterion for supplier selection is on-time distribution, followed by distribution cost, external image and appearance in public, social responsibility rate, and air pollution, respectively. The sensitivity and comparative analysis were also performed, and the technique confirmed a high level of stability.