SELECTING PARTNER IN THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY USING COMBINATION OF FANP AND FCOPRAS \r\nMETHODS

Selecting a suitable partner is a vital issue for establishing an ecient and useful supply chain system. The main cause is the signicant responsibility of partner performance in supply chain management (SCM) for many aspects such as decreasing costs, improving customer service, maximizing revenue, reducing supply chain risk and optimizing inventory levels, business process and cycle times. Accordingly, these would result in increased competitiveness, customer satisfaction and protability. On the other hand, partner selection is a complex issue that may involve diverse and dierent types of criteria, group decision-making and dierent forms of uncertainty. Strategic airline alliances are an increasingly common strategy for enhancing airline competitiveness and satisfying customer needs. ,especially in an era characterized by blurring industry boundaries, fast-changing technologies, and global integration. Strategic alliance strategies allow air lines to expand networks, attract more passengers, and take advantage of product complementarities, as well as providing cost-reduction opportunities in passenger service related areas. In this paper, a hybrid multi criteria decision making model is proposed to cope with partner selection problems. This model is based on combination of Fuzzy Analytical Network Process (FANP) and Fuzzy Complex Proportional Assessment (FCOPRAS).The analytical network process (ANP) is exploited in order to handle tangible and intangible criteria and to overcome the problem of interrelation among criteria or alternatives .In addition, fuzzy theory is utilized to model decision makers' judgments with trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. To rank the alternatives, the COPRAS method has been utilized which provides valuable and useful information including the extent of objectives and demands achieved by decision makers and the amount of eciency for one alternative towards another. Finally \the Airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran" as a real case is applied to demonstrate the procedure of the proposed model and select the appropriate partner. Results show the great ability of the proposed approach in solving unstructured and complex partner selection problems under incomplete and vague information environment.