TOPSIS method for quality credit evaluation: A case of air-conditioning market in China

Quality credit is a new concept invented in China and to the best of our knowledge, there hasn't been a widely-accepted quality credit indicator system and no quantitative method has been employed in quality credit evaluation up to now. To take the researches on quality credit a step further, this paper aims to establish a quality credit evaluation indicator system for air-conditioning enterprises in Chinese market and use TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) method to evaluate quality credit of the enterprises. Based on the data of 8 air-conditioning enterprises, including 6 Chinese enterprises and 2 Japanese enterprises, three experiments with three different indicator systems are used to determine the final indicator system and verify the feasibility and effectiveness of TOPSIS. In Experiment one, an original indicator system is established to evaluate the quality credit of the 8 enterprises. In Experiment two and three, two reasonably adjusted indicator systems are used and the indicator system in Experiment three is the final one that we recommend. The analysis of experiments verifies that the proposed quality credit indicator system is reliable and TOPSIS is suitable for quality credit evaluation.