Use of Lp Metric for Ranking Suppliers

Mathematically, the Lj, metric represents the distance between two vectors x and y, where x, y e R , and is given by  

One of the most commonly used metrics is the L2 metric (p = 2), which measures the Euclidean distance between two vectors. The ranking of suppliers is done by calculating the metric between the Ideal solution (H) and each vector representing the supplier s ratings for the criteria. The Ideal solution represents the best values possible for each criterion from the initial list of suppliers. Since no supplier will have the best values for all criteria (e.g., a supplier with minimum cost may have poor quality and delivery time), the ideal solution is an artificial target and cannot be achieved. The Lp metric approach computes the distance of each supplier s attributes from the ideal solution and ranks the supplier s based on that distance (the smaller 

Criteria Ideal Value Criteria Ideal Value 

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