Built‐to‐Suit Telecoms Contractor Selection Using an Interval Type‐3 Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process

ABSTRACT

Build‐to‐suit (BTS) contractors deliver turnkey passive telecom sites, and choosing among them is a high‐stakes group decision dominated by vague linguistic judgements. This paper develops an interval type‐3 fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (IT3‐FAHP) in which pairwise judgements are interval type‐3 triangular fuzzy numbers whose footprint of uncertainty carries a secondary credibility grade, and priorities follow from an ‐plane Buckley geometric‐mean derivation with type‐3 reduction and defuzzification. Applied to five candidate contractors at Naselecom Company Limited (six criteria, eighteen sub‐criteria), the method identifies contractor A3 as the best bid (score 0.2158), with technical capability (0.309) and delivery reliability (0.227) dominant and a consistency ratio () of 0.027. Crisp, type‐1 and type‐2 benchmarks return the identical ranking (Spearman ), while only the type‐3 model quantifies how decision confidence degrades as expert disagreement grows.