Applications of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process in Urban Mobility System

Importance of urban mobility system is increasing from year to year. This is the reason why decision making process is increasingly complex requiring taking into account more and more different criteria. One of the important and commonly used techniques that support decision making processes is Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) while for the purpose of supporting a more realistic way of decision making, fuzzy logic is used. The paper examines the use of fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) in the urban mobility system. With the use of systematic literature review (SLR) it categorises peer reviewed journals’ articles related to the applications of FAHP in urban mobility system and extracted from Scopus and Web of science database, and analyses them methodologically. Papers were classified based on basic attributes of research papers, features of urban mobility system (UMS) where the FAHP was used, and use characteristics of the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). The results of this study indicated that the use of FAHP in urban mobility system is increasing with the first published paper in 2009. Our review has found that FAHP is used for very different purposes such as evaluation of customer expectations or citing a selection problem. Most often it is used in combination with other methods. Interestingly, there is only one paper that uses FAHP for decision making in the whole urban mobility system

Emergency Rescue Location Model with Uncertain Rescue Time

In order to model emergency rescue location problem with uncertain rescue time, an uncertain expected cost minimization model is proposed under uncertain environment. For solving this model, we convert the uncertain model to its equivalent deterministic form. Finally, a numerical example has been presented to illustrate the model. The computational results which were solved by the down mountain algorithm are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model

AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR QUALITY EVALUATION OF FRUITS AND VEGETABLE STORE LOCATED IN THE SUPERMARKET UNDER UTOPIAN ENVIRONMENT

Customer satisfaction depends on the availability of different varieties of fruits and vegetables in a supermarket store as well as the quality of this supermarket store for fruits and vegetables. The store may contain different variety of fruits and vegetables in a utopian environment. Apart from this, there are several quality parameters of a fruits and vegetable store. The quality evaluation of fruits and vegetable stores located in a supermarket is a big challenge for managerial personnel. Here, a quality evaluation framework is proposed for the fruits and vegetable store. The committee of experts identifies and finalizes the quality evaluation parameters through a brainstorming session. Fuzzy AHP is used to calculate the weights of evaluation parameters. A fuzzy TOPSIS generally ranks for the alternative stores. An improved fuzzy TOPSIS, which is named fuzzy k-TOPSIS, is proposed here to evaluate the quality of fruits and vegetable stores located in a supermarket. The fuzzy k-TOPSIS will provide rank as well as classification of the alternatives. A numerical example is demonstrated for a better understanding of the proposed framework

Potential applications of unmanned ground and aerial vehicles to mitigate challenges of transport and logistics-related critical success factors in the humanitarian supply chain

The present decade has seen an upsurge in the research on the applications of autonomous vehicles and drones to present innovative and sustainable solutions for traditional transportation and logistical challenges. Similarly, in this study, we propose using autonomous cars and drones to resolve conventional logistics and transport challenges faced by international humanitarian organizations (IHOs) during a relief operation. We do so by identifying, shortlisting, and elaborating critical success factors or key transport and logistics challenges from the existing humanitarian literature and present a conceptual model to mitigate these challenges by integrating unmanned ground (UGVs) and aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the humanitarian supply chain. To understand how this novel idea of using UGVs and UAVs could help IHOs, we drafted three research questions, first focusing on the identification of existing challenges, second concentrating on remediation of these challenges, and the third to understand realization timeline for UGVs and UAVs. This lead to the development of a semi-structured, open-ended questionnaire to record the respondents’ perspectives on the existing challenges and their potential solutions. We gathered data form, ten interviewees, with substantial experience in the humanitarian sector from six IHOs stationed in Pakistan and Austria. In light of the feedback for the second research question, we present a conceptual model of integrating UAVs and UGVs in the relief chain. The results of the study indicate that technological advancement in mobility withholds the potential to mitigate the existing challenges faced by IHOs. However, IHOs tend to be reluctant in adapting UGVs compared to UAVs. The results also indicate that the adaptation of these technologies is subject to their technical maturity, and there are no significant differences in opinions found between the IHOs from Pakistan and Austria

Optimization for Decision Making II

In the current context of the electronic governance of society, both administrations and citizens are demanding the greater participation of all the actors involved in the decision-making process relative to the governance of society. This book presents collective works published in the recent Special Issue (SI) entitled “Optimization for Decision Making II”. These works give an appropriate response to the new challenges raised, the decision-making process can be done by applying different methods and tools, as well as using different objectives. In real-life problems, the formulation of decision-making problems and the application of optimization techniques to support decisions are particularly complex and a wide range of optimization techniques and methodologies are used to minimize risks, improve quality in making decisions or, in general, to solve problems. In addition, a sensitivity or robustness analysis should be done to validate/analyze the influence of uncertainty regarding decision-making. This book brings together a collection of inter-/multi-disciplinary works applied to the optimization of decision making in a coherent manner

Dynamic Relief Items Distribution Model with Sliding Time Window in the Post-Disaster Environment

In smart cities, relief items distribution is a complex task due to the factors such as incomplete information, unpredictable exact demand, lack of resources, and causality levels, to name a few. With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, dynamic data update provides the scope of distribution schedule to adopt changes with updates. Therefore, the dynamic relief items distribution schedule becomes a need to generate humanitarian supply chain schedules as a smart city application. To address the disaster data updates in different time periods, a dynamic optimised model with a sliding time window is proposed that defines the distribution schedule of relief items from multiple supply points to different disaster regions. The proposed model not only considers the details of available resources dynamically but also introduces disaster region priority along with transportation routes information updates for each scheduling time slot. Such an integrated optimised model delivers an effective distribution schedule to start with and updates it for each time slot. A set of numerical case studies is formulated to evaluate the performance of the optimised scheduling. The dynamic updates on the relief item demands’ travel path, causality level and available resources parameters have been included as performance measures for optimising the distributing schedule. The models have been evaluated based on performance measures to reflect disaster scenarios. Evaluation of the proposed models in comparison to the other perspective static and dynamic relief items distribution models shows that adopting dynamic updates in the distribution model cover most of the major aspects of the relief items distribution task in a more realistic way for post-disaster relief management. The analysis has also shown that the proposed model has the adaptability to address the changing demand and resources availability along with disaster conditions. In addition, this model will also help the decision-makers to plan the post-disaster relief operations in more effective ways by covering the updates on disaster data in each time period