Logistics service provider selection using TOPSIS and VIKOR methods

Abstract

Choosing a transportation provider is one of the most important choices for a successful business. Forwarding companies rely on past relationships and managerial skills to choose a logistics service providers. There is a number of criteria that need to be taken into account when evaluating a transportation service provider, which are, i.e. one criterion should be as high as possible and the other as low as possible. Multi-criteria decision making methods are commonly used to solve this problem. This article uses VIKOR and TOPSIS multi-criteria decision making methods. 10 transport service providers are ranked, the results of the methods are compared and the expert opinion is compared with the criteria calculated from the actual data. The ranking results are similar for both methods, but differ the ranking of experts and criteria is based on actual data.