A fuzzy TOPSIS based approach for e-sourcing

This study presents a methodology for solving the sealed bid, multi-attribute reverse auction problem of e-sourcing in which the sales item is defined by several attributes, the buyer is auctioneer, and the suppliers are the bidders. There is only one buyer and a number of suppliers. Both qualitative and quantitative attributes of benefit and cost types are considered for solving the winner determination (WD) problem of reverse auction. Here, the WD problem is considered as multi-criteria decision making problem (MCDM). In order to address the imprecision of suppliers or decision makers in formulating the preference value of various attributes in MCDM, a fuzzy TOPSIS based methodology along with a mechanism for determination of fuzzy linguistic value of each attribute is proposed in this article. Entropy method is utilised to enumerate the weights of various attributes automatically without involvement of decision makers. An illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology.