Selection and Application of Building Material Suppliers Based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (IFAHP) Model

Scientific selection of building materials supplier is of great importance in the management of construction projects. In this work, the selection problem of building material suppliers is investigated under the background of economic globalization based on the IFAHP approach. Firstly, according to the features and key factors of building materials supplier selection, this work constructs evaluation index system by taking five aspects including cost, quality, service level, supplier qualification and risk into account. Secondly, the intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations (IFPRs) of criteria or sub-criteria and IFPRs between the alternatives with respect to each sub-criterion are determined via paired comparisons. The consistency check is carried out subsequently. Considering that the interaction process between experts and decision makers is time consuming and the experts may be not willing to participate in the adjustment and correction of IFPR continuously, an algorithm is proposed to automatically correct the inconsistency while preserving the original information even without experts involved. Consequently, the time costs of experts can be greatly shortened. Based on the above analysis, the optimal scheme can be obtained via calculating the scores of each material supplier. A case study on the selection of building material suppliers is conducted by employing the proposed framework. Results show that the scores of the three suppliers is positively correlated with the weight of the cost but negatively correlated with that of quality, service level, supplier qualification and risk. Besides, the sensitivity analysis illustrates that product quality and service level affect the ranking greatly.