Designing a Novel Decision Support System Model to Evaluate and Select Contractors Participating in Civil Tenders inside Iran

Contractor evaluation and selection is one of the most important decision making problems that many regulations and methods have been introduced for it. In Iran, "Planning and Management Organization" is responsible for classification and prequalification of contractors and due to this responsibility, this organization edit the Contractors Classification and Prequalification Regulation regularly. This regulation should be applied in Public sector and project owners should fulfill their tenders with respect to the article of tenders by law. In general, the current system is a multistage process in which, the best contractor will be selected according to its propositional price for tenders, in final step. In this paper, a multi criteria decision making model is introduced which can consider all of quantitative and qualitative factors that may affect on contractor selection in tenders. Six general criteria are considered in this model as the most effective factors on selecting a contractor; some of these criteria have their own sub criteria. A Fuzzy MADM method (by using linguistic variables) is used to rank the contractors and to select the best contractor in tenders.