A Novel Multi-Criteria Decision Sorting Approach based on Chebyshev’s Theorem for Supplier Classification Problem

One of the interesting features of Multi-Criteria Decision Making/ Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MCDM/ MADM) is that a number of techniques that can be used to solve the same problem. In general, three common categories of decision problems are choice problem, ranking problem, and sorting problem. While, the issue of choice and ranking problems is more emphasized in MCDM/ MADM, but the literature weakly consider sorting problems. Several solutions for the above problem are suggested (i.e., Flow sort, AHP-Sort, ELECTRE Tri, etc.). Theoretically, there is no reason to be limited to these techniques. Hence, in this paper we propose a novel multi-criteria sorting method that is based on Chebyshev's theorem. More specifically, different from other studies on MCDM sorting problems, which put more emphasis on the extension of new models, this work attempts to present a general framework using the Chebyshev's inequality, to transform the results of conventional MCDM models from ranking format to sort mode. Finally, the proposed approach is compared with three existed models. Compared results show that the proposed method is efficient and the results are stable.