An application of the AHP in 3PL vendor selection of a 4PL system

As a fourth party logistics provider integrates the capacities of third party logistics providers, 3PL vendor selection is an important problem. Furthermore, 3PL vendor selection is a complex multi-criteria decision problem. The decision made by the decision maker or an evaluation team can be improved by a systematic and logistical approach to access priorities based on the inputs of the decision maker or the team made by several people. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be very useful in reaching a likely result which can satisfy the decision maker or the team. In this paper, an AHP-based model is formulated and applied to a case study to examining the function in 3PL vendor selection. The use of the proposed model indicates that the computed quantitative evaluations can be applied to improve the precision of the selection.