Abstract
Building material supplier evaluation and selection is a significant strategic-decision problem for reducing construction costs and ensuring the quality of a residential product. As people are increasingly concerning about the green level of a residential product and the competition in the housing market is becoming increasingly fierce, it becomes important to select a green customer-oriented material supplier for property developers. Quality function deployment (QFD) has been proven to be an effective quality-control technique to take customer voices into consideration. However, the relationship matrix in the QFD technique, as a key to translate customer requirements into technical attributes, was subjectively given by decision-makers in previous studies, which failed to reflect customer requirements accurately. The aim of this study is to put forward a neighborhood-rough-set-based quality function deployment model for a green-building-material supplier selection. The neighborhood rough set, as a nonparametric and flexible data-mining approach, can effectively and objectively determine the core relationships between a variety of factors. A rough number-based aggregation approach is applied to effectively and objectively aggregate the evaluations given by a group of experts. Then, the classical double normalization-based multiple aggregation method, which considers two types of normalization methods, three aggregation models, and a comprehensive score formula, is extended in rough-number form in order to rank the alternatives. Afterward, an attempt is made to evaluate and rank eleven alternative building-material suppliers for a repute property developer in mainland China, and the corresponding comparative and sensitive analyses verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed hybrid model.