Abstract
The African coffee market offers a rich and diverse range of coffee profiles. The coffee producers of Africa face numerous challenges like climate change, market fluctuations, diseases, soil degradation and limited access to finance. These challenges badly affect their productivity, quality and livelihood. There are different factors like social and cultural, which can affect the coffee production. This study aims to develop multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods and their applications in coffee market specifically in identifying factors influencing consumers' coffee brand preferences in South Africa, which is known for its vibrant coffee culture. For this purpose, first we developed the technique of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in the environment of triangular q-rung orthopair fuzzy numbers. The triangular q-rung fuzzy numbers can effectively handle the uncertainity. The AHP technique has widely been used in decision making due to its flexibility in assigning weights and dealing with vagueness. The weights of critera plays a very important role in an MCDM problem. The development of AHP technique in triangular q-rung orthopair fuzzy environment can improve the decision making (DM) by handling vagueness in data and by using the most appropriate weights. Furthermore this new proposed method improves accuracy and minimize the information loss. The newly peoposed method is applied to different MCDM problems and comparative analysis is conducted to check the validity of results.