170 European J. Industrial Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2009 Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Contractor selection in government procurement auctions: a case study Sidhartha Siladitya Padhi* and Pratap Kumar Jagadev Mohapatra Department of Industrial Engineering and Management IIT Kharagpur West Bengal – 721 302, India E-mail: spadhi@iem.iitkgp.ernet.in E-mail: pratap_moha@yahoo.co.in *Corresponding author Abstract: This paper aims to present a combined fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and Simple Multi-Attribute Ranking Technique (SMART) approach to deal with the contractor selection problem in government procurement auctions. The proposed approach utilises a set of ten attributes for the evaluation of a contractor. In this approach, the attributes of both the past performance and the present status of the contractor is considered wherein the selection attributes are qualitative and/or quantitative type having inhibiting and/or enabling in nature. A case study of the Rural Development Department of the government of Orissa has been taken up to demonstrate the contractor selection process. [Submitted 9 February 2008; Revised 27 June 2008; Revised 8 August 2008; Accepted 12 August 2008] Keywords: government procurement auction; fuzzy analytical hierarchical process and simple multi-attribute ranking technique; fuzzy AHP-SMART; government procurement; contractor selection. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Padhi, S.S. and Mohapatra, P.K.J. (2009) ‘Contractor selection in government procurement auctions: a case study’, European J. Industrial Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp.170–186. Biographical notes: Sidhartha Siladitya Padhi is a Research Scholar and is working in the area of e-procurement in government in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, India. He obtained his BE in Mechanical Engineering from Utkal University, Orissa, India, and his MTech in Scientific Computing from the Birla Institute of Technology (BIT) Mesra, India. Pratap Kumar Jagadev Mohapatra is a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management of IIT Kharagpur, India. He holds both a BME (Hons) and MME from Jadavpur University, India, and a PhD from IIT Kharagpur, India. He has worked in several areas, including supply chain management, strategic management, agriculture productivity and e-business. He currently serves as the Dean of Postgraduate Study and Research at IIT Kharagpur.