The use of axiomatic fuzzy set theory in AHP and TOPSIS methodology to determine strategies priorities by SWOT analysis

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) matrix is one of the most used tools for strategic planning, specially in the stage of extracting strategies. While the use of SWOT analysis is quite common and popular, it still continuous to have certain structural problems such that: the lack of considering uncertain and boolean (two sided) factors, lack of prioritization of the factors and too many extractable strategies. In this paper, we deal with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to find weights of SWOT groups and weights of sub-factors within each groups; and we make use of the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methodology to determine strategies priority. In addition, in order to deal with uncertainty and vagueness, we incorporate axiomatic fuzzy set (AFS) theory instead of traditional fuzzy set theory. AHP and TOPSIS are applied to the light of AFS theory. The advantages of dealing with AFS theory in the proposed approach are that: it can directly be applied to the data, the features of the data-sets can be mixed; however, the traditional fuzzy set theory deals with fuzzy numbers and it’s clear that different fuzzy numbers will lead to different results; hence the inconsistency of previous methodologies, described in the literature, copes with the methodology proposed in this paper. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013