Selection of raw materials in textile spinning industry using fuzzy multi-criteria decision making approach

Selection of raw materials in textile spinning industry is a multi-criteria decision making problem. It is a decision of strategic importance as textile is a typical high volume but low profit industry. The nature of raw material selection decision, in most of the cases, is very crude and unstructured. Therefore, advanced decision science techniques might be useful for solving such kind of intricate problems. The inability of common decision making methods to handle imprecision and uncertainty, make them inapt in situations which involves fuzzy information. However, fuzzy decision making techniques can elicit reasonable and logical solutions in these situations. This paper presents the use of fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to select the raw materials (cotton fibres) for the textile spinning industries. The results indicate that the fuzzy AHP can quantitatively translate the imprecise perception of the decision maker and yield better results than some of the traditional raw material selection methods used in the textile industry.