A Novel Decision-Making Framework Based on Interval-Valued Pythagorean Fuzzy AHP and CODAS: An Application to Healthcare Supplier Selection

Abstract

Especially after the COVID-19 pandemics where market dynamics have changed dramatically, supplier selection has been one of the crucial subjects for almost every industry. After the pandemics, the healthcare industry has played a major role and gained even more importance in all over the world; therefore, selecting the best appropriate supplier has become more critical than ever. In this paper, supplier selection and evaluation problem is analyzed for a specific area of the healthcare industry, i.e. laboratory (lab.) equipments including test tubes and sample containers. Considering the vagueness and imprecise information in the decision-making environment, the problem is handled by considering five main criteria and 20 sub-criteria under fuzzy environment. In the study, a relatively recent extension of the fuzzy sets called as Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets (PFS), which provides more flexibility to the decision makers with membership and non-membership degrees, are utilized. This paper aims to contribute to the literature by proposing a novel fuzzy methodology integrating Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Combinative Distance-based Assessment (CODAS) method based on interval-valued PFS. Finally, sensitivity analysis is constructed in the paper. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.