An application of fuzzy TOPSIS method in an SWOT analysis

Analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) is a method to formulate the strategy. Although the SWOT analysis successfully provides the key factors of the problem, it has some drawbacks in selecting appropriate strategy for the evaluation and final decision steps. During recent years, some multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques such as analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and analytic network process (ANP) remove some of these deficiencies, but the nature of these decision usually is very complex and using crisp data is not suitable. In this paper, linguistic variable represented with fuzzy numbers are used to assess the ratings and weights. Then, a MCDM model based on fuzzy sets theory is proposed to handle the strategy selection problem with imprecise data. According to the concept of the TOPSIS in multiple-criteria group decision making (MCGDM) problem, an index of closeness coefficient (CC) is defined to determine the ranking order of all strategies by calculating the distance to the both fuzzy ideal solution and fuzzy anti-ideal solution based on approach of ordering of the fuzzy numbers simultaneously. Finally, an example is given to highlight the procedure of the proposed method.