Volume 6 • Issue 1 • PP: 34–39 • 2026
A Single-Valued Neutrosophic TOPSIS Model for Supplier Selection under Indeterminate Judgements: A Decision-Support Perspective on Information Fusion
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© 2026 The Author(s). Published by ASPG. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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Supplier selection is a recurrent multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem in which expert judgements are rarely crisp: procurement managers routinely hesitate, disagree, and abstain. Classical fuzzy models capture membership and (at most) non-membership, but they cannot separately encode the indeterminacy that pervades real committee evaluations. This paper develops a supplier-selection model built on single-valued neutrosophic sets (SVNSs), where every judgement is represented by an independent triple of truth, indeterminacy and falsity degrees. Group opinions are aggregated by a single-valued neutrosophic weighted averaging operator, providing a transparent information-fusion step, after which an extended TOPSIS procedure ranks the alternatives by their relative closeness to neutrosophic ideal solutions. A worked case with five suppliers and six criteria illustrates the pipeline end to end, and a sensitivity study over the score function and criteria weights confirms that the top-ranked supplier is stable across 200 weight perturbations. Benchmarked against fuzzy-TOPSIS and intuitionistic-fuzzy TOPSIS baselines, the neutrosophic model separates genuinely ambiguous suppliers from clearly dominated ones more reliably, preserving a wider spread of closeness coefficients in the contested middle of the ranking.
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References
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