Joint selection of customs broker agencies and international road transportation firms by a fuzzy analytic network process approach

This paper considers a special case for logistics activities in Turkey: a joint selection of customs broker agency and international road transportation firm. For this purpose a decision-making team has been constituted, including members of logistics and finance departments and an academic. They determined related quantitative and qualitative criteria for the selection process. To cover the vagueness of related qualitative data, a fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) based model was formulated and applied to the decision-making process. The FANP model encompasses and substantially resolves the ambiguity and imprecision of the pairwise comparison process. By using the proposed FANP structure, the joint selection problem could be solved in a much easier way by also considering the inter-dependencies related to criteria.

Research highlights
► This paper considers a special case for logistics activities in Turkey a joint selection of customs broker agency and international road transportation firm.
► For this purpose a decision-making team has been constituted to determine related quantitative and qualitative criteria for the selection process.
► To cover the vagueness of related qualitative data a fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) based model was formulated and applied.
► The proposed FANP structure helps to solve the joint selection problem in an easier way by considering the inter-dependencies related to criteria.