AHP, Fuzzy Measure and Fuzzy Integral Approaches for the Appraisal of Information Service Providers in Taiwan

Abstract Information service providers (ISPs) play a pivotal role in facilitating and coordinating enterprises' daily operations by furnishing them with a wide range of information service (IS). Thus, the effective appraisal of ISPs is a critical issue since it critically affects enterprises' decisions on the eventual selection of an appropriate ISP. This study is designed to support those decisions, and it begins by proposing a hierarchy structure for the problems involved in appraising the ISPs. Then, based on the hierarchy structure, both additive (analytic hierarchy process, AHP) and non-additive (fuzzy measure and fuzzy integral) multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods are applied. The results of AHP show that the first three most important dimensions are: performance of information systems, awareness of and response to customer requirements, and performance of networking. Detailed investigation of each criterion indicates that data security and user privacy protection, virus and hacker damage prevention, the maintenance of normal IS operations, rapid resolution of customer problems and stable networking with increasing speed are the more important criteria. For non-additive measurement, the fuzzy measure of various criteria and their combinations within each dimension are obtained for subsequent calculation of the value of fuzzy integral. Finally, ten real cases are employed as illustrative alternatives to demonstrate the synthesis decision under the application of both MCDM methods.

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