Supplier selection in nuclear power industry with extended VIKOR method under linguistic information

•There is no investigation of supplier selection in nuclear power industry using extended VIKOR under linguistic information.•The proposed method can promote the accuracy and quality of decision-making.•The decision process and management efficiency can be improved.

With Chinese nuclear power restarting, supplier selection in quality-sensitive nuclear power industry has become increasingly urgent and necessary. However, the current research on supplier selection in nuclear power industry is rather few. Moreover, there is still one great problem in the present methods: the description of the information uncertainty is inadequate. This paper proposes an extended Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) under linguistic information to evaluate the uncertainty of potential supplier quantitatively and scientifically. The cloud model is used to handle imprecise numerical quantities, which can give consideration to both fuzziness and randomness of uncertain information. An empirical example of a nuclear power plant in China illustrates an application to supplier selection in nuclear power industry, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method. Finally, a comparative analysis with fuzzy VIKOR and sensitivity analysis of results are presented to verify the correctness and robustness of the extended method respectively.

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