The stochastıc vikor method and its use in reverse logistic option selection problem

Department of Industrial Engineering, Erciyes University, 38039 Talas, Kayseri, Turkey.
ekaydogan@erciyes.edu.tr

Received: 3 February 2015
Accepted: 29 March 2016

Abstract

In this paper a new method, SMAA-VIKOR, was proposed for stochastic multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems and the effectiveness of the method was shown by comparing literature data and a case study. In some decision making situations, decision makers (DMs) can’t or don’t express their preferences openly. In such cases stochastic multi-criteria acceptability analysis (SMAA-2) is applicable. The proposed method, SMAA-VIKOR, is the combination of the SMAA-2 and VIKOR methods. Our aim was to see if we can employ VIKOR in handling imprecise, uncertain data, in a word to compose stochastic VIKOR. The SMAA-VIKOR method was applied to the drug benefit-risk analysis problem in the literature. In addition, a case study evaluating the reverse logistic option selection problem is used to illustrate the proposed method. This study indicated that VIKOR could be used with uncertain and arbitrarily distributed values for weights and criteria measurements by using SMAA-VIKOR. The results show that SMAA-VIKOR gives more significant and consistent SMAA outputs and it can also be effective in helping logistic managers in decision making