Journal of Decision Engineering

AlthoughStrengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis is a suitable tool for identifying effective factors in order to determine the strategies for an organization, but this analysis cannot take into account the importance or preference of the factors. Consequently, SWOT is unable to determine the most appropriate strategy for the organization. Because the factors in SWOT analysis are not independent, the combination of SWOT with the methods such as AHP and TOPSIS cannot solve the problem. Using the ANP which can consider the dependencies within the factors, along with SWOT analysis is able to solve the problem of dependencies, but in real world, there are some other limitations such as budget or labor hours which need to be considered in the problem. Combined ANP and SWOT analysis take into account these mentioned limitations. In this paper, the combination of ANP along with goal programming approach is proposed with SWOT analysis in order to remove these drawbacks. The proposed approach not only considers the real world limitations but also with its distance function, is able to choose the most appropriate alternative. To validate the proposed approach, the model was applied for textile industry in Turkey and Iran. The data for the Turkey, taken from the research which have been done by Yuksel and Dagdeviren. The results show the two countries, apply the same strategy for the textile industry. However, the comparison shows the Iranian experts has the most consistencies in their judgments.