Ranking alternative strategies by SWOT analysis in the framework of the axiomatic fuzzy set theory and the ER approach

Abstract

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis is one of the most widely used strategic planning and decision making tool. However, it still has some structural problems such as the lack of prioritization of the alternatives, and too many extractable strategies. In this paper, we suggest a new approach to ranking the strategy alternatives via the SWOT analysis by making use of the Axiomatic Fuzzy Set (AFS) theory to find the best description of the alternatives and use the Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach in the light of AFS to rank the alternatives. The advantages of using the hybrid method (AFS theory and ER approach) to rank the alternatives are that: arbitrary “values in between” of the Expected Utilities are avoided; Decision Makers (DMs) do not need to give subjective judgments to the values of the degree of belief but instead, degrees of belief are directly obtained from the database via AFS theory. A comparison analysis with previous methodologies is made, and it is shown than the proposed hybrid methodology provides a far higher flexibility and effectiveness.