Contractor selection in MCDM context using fuzzy AHP

Contractor selection is one of the most important problems in supply chain management, and it strongly effects a firm's performance. Because a significant amount of a university's budget is assigned to construction contracts, contractor selection is an important problem for the financial status of universities. Since contractor selection is a multi-criteria decision making problem, lots of methods have been proposed to face this problem. Analytic hierarchy processes (AHP) and other traditional methods have beem widely used for contractor and vendor selection by researches using lots of linguistic variables and both qualitative and quantitative criteria to tackle the ambiguous nature of the problem, although there is some insufficiency about them. In this article, the authors use FAHP that is a fuzzy extension of AHP to handle the fuzziness of the data involved in deciding the preferences of different decision variables. The authors focus on Tehran University's construction contracts.