Supplier Selection and Performance Evaluation for High-Voltage Power Film Capacitors in a Fuzzy Environment

Abstract

Rapid advances in technology have shortened the upgrade and replacement cycles in industries such as electronics, household appliances, and communication technologies. Within these industries, high-voltage power film capacitors have become indispensable electrical components due to their good electrical performance and high reliability. The selection and evaluation of suppliers of these capacitors is therefore increasingly important. Suppliers play a crucial role in the electronics industry; the quality of their products determines the degree to which the quality of the final product can be guaranteed. Supplier quality also affects the ability of all the members in a supply chain to control costs. Evaluation by decision-makers is highly significant in the supplier selection process. However, when the opinions of multiple decision-makers are combined, issues such as cognitive differences, fuzzy linguistics, and uncertainty are common. This study presents a supplier performance index SPL and derives the estimates of the index SPL and its statistical properties. The proposed index is not only helpful for the accurate measurement of supplier performance; it can also reduce cognitive differences among evaluators in the decision-making process (that is, the sample variability associated with the Likert scale). Evaluation scores for each criterion for the linguistic labels are converted to triangular fuzzy numbers in order to reduce ambiguity. Subsequently, integrated crisp values are obtained by defuzzification in a fuzzy inference system. A real-world case study of the supplier selection of high-voltage power film capacitors is provided to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method.