Integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method combined with decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) and analytic network process (ANP) in food supplier selection

The analytic network process (ANP) is a relatively new multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method which can be used to solve supplier selection problem. Because there are different degrees of influence among the criteria, using ANP average method (equal cluster-weighted) to obtain the weighted supermatrix may be inexact. This paper uses an effective solution based on a combined ANP and the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) approach to help food companies that need to select the best food supplier. This paper surveyed the multi-criteria supplier selection approaches, revealing the most popular criteria and sub-criteria, then designed DEMATEL questionnaires and surveyed managers of purchasing departments. According to the managers’ suggestion, an integrated method which combines DEMATEL and ANP could be used to analyze and compute the causal relationships and relative importance weights of the criteria of a system. Finally, a case study was used to demonstrate that the proposed method is more suitable and reasonable than the traditional analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method.