Managing Interacting Criteria: Application to Environmental Evaluation Practices

The need for organizations to evaluate their environmental practices has been recently increasing. This fact has led to the development of many approaches to appraise such practices. In this paper, a novel decision model to evaluate company’s environmental practices is proposed to improve traditional evaluation process in different facets. Firstly, different reviewers’ collectives related to the company’s activity are taken into account in the process to increase company internal efficiency and external legitimacy. Secondly, following the standard ISO 14031, two general categories of environmental performance indicators, management and operational, are considered. Thirdly, since the assumption of independence among environmental indicators is rarely verified in environmental context, an aggregation operator to bear in mind the relationship among such indicators in the evaluation results is proposed. Finally, this new model integrates quantitative and qualitative information with different scales using a multi-granular linguistic model that allows to adapt diverse evaluation scales according to appraisers’ knowledge

Multiple criteria approach applied to digital transformation in fashion stores: the case of physical retailers in Spain

This research is funded by the Spanish State Research Agency, as part of the project PID2019103880RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and by the Andalusian Government, as part of the project P20_00673.In a very open competitive context where pure online players are consistently gaining market share, the use of digital devices is a steady trend which is penetrating physical retail stores as a tool for retailers to improve customer experience and increase engagement. This need has increased with the COVID-19 pandemic as electronic devices in physical stores reduce the contact between people providing a greater sense of health safety, hence improving the customer experience. This work develops a multiple-criteria decision-making model for retailers who want to digitize their physical stores, providing a systematic approach to manage investment priorities in the organization. Important decisions should involve all different areas of the organization: Finance, Clients, Internal Processes and Learning & Growth departments. This strategic decision can be made hierarchically to obtain consistent decisions, also the use of the Order Weighted Average operator allows for alternative scenarios to be presented and agreed among the different areas of the business. The authors develop a use case for a Spanish fashion retailer. In the most widely agreed scenario the preferred devices were more technologically complex and expensive, while in the scenarios where the head of Finance is more predominant, cheaper and simpler devices were selected.Spanish Government PID2019103880RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033Andalusian Government P20_0067

Framework for optimizing intelligence collection requirements

In the military, typical mission execution goes through cycles of intelligence collection and action planning phases. For complex operations where many parameters affect the outcomes of the mission, several steps may be taken for intelligence collection before the optimal Course of Action is actually carried out. Human analytics suggests the steps of: (1) anticipating plausible futures, (2) determining information requirements, and (3) optimize the choice of feasible and cost-effective intelligence requirements. This work formalizes this process by developing a decision support tool to determine information requirements needed to differentiate critical plausible futures, and formulating a mixed integer programming problem to trade-off the feasibility and benefits of intelligence collection requirements. Course of Action planning has been widely studied in the military domain, but mostly in an abstract fashion. Intelligence collection, while intuitively aiming at reducing uncertainties, should ultimately produce optimal outcomes for mission success. Building on previous efforts, this work studies the effect of plausible futures estimated based on current adversary activities. A set of differentiating event attributes are derived for each set of high impact futures, forming a candidate collection requirement action. The candidate collection requirement actions are then used as inputs to a Mixed Integer Programming formulation, which optimizes the plausible future mission state subject to timing and cost constraints. The plausible future mission state is estimated by assuming that the Collection Requirement Actions can potentially avert the damages adversary future activities might cause. A case study was performed to demonstrate several use cases for the overall framework

Architecture value mapping: using fuzzy cognitive maps as a reasoning mechanism for multi-criteria conceptual design evaluation

The conceptual design phase is the most critical phase in the systems engineering life cycle. The design concept chosen during this phase determines the structure and behavior of the system, and consequently, its ability to fulfill its intended function. A good conceptual design is the first step in the development of a successful artifact. However, decision-making during conceptual design is inherently challenging and often unreliable. The conceptual design phase is marked by an ambiguous and imprecise set of requirements, and ill-defined system boundaries. A lack of usable data for design evaluation makes the problem worse. In order to assess a system accurately, it is necessary to capture the relationships between its physical attributes and the stakeholders\u27 value objectives. This research presents a novel conceptual architecture evaluation approach that utilizes attribute-value networks, designated as \u27Architecture Value Maps\u27, to replicate the decision makers\u27 cogitative processes. Ambiguity in the system\u27s overall objectives is reduced hierarchically to reveal a network of criteria that range from the abstract value measures to the design-specific performance measures. A symbolic representation scheme, the 2-Tuple Linguistic Representation is used to integrate different types of information into a common computational format, and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps are utilized as the reasoning engine to quantitatively evaluate potential design concepts. A Linguistic Ordered Weighted Average aggregation operator is used to rank the final alternatives based on the decision makers\u27 risk preferences. The proposed methodology provides systems architects with the capability to exploit the interrelationships between a system\u27s design attributes and the value that stakeholders associate with these attributes, in order to design robust, flexible, and affordable systems --Abstract, page iii

Decision making techniques with similarity measures and OWA operators

We analyse the use of the ordered weighted average (OWA) in decision-making giving special attention to business and economic decision-making problems. We present several aggregation techniques that are very useful for decision-making such as the Hamming distance, the adequacy coefficient and the index of maximum and minimum level. We suggest a new approach by using immediate weights, that is, by using the weighted average and the OWA operator in the same formulation. We further generalize them by using generalized and quasi-arithmetic means. We also analyse the applicability of the OWA operator in business and economics and we see that we can use it instead of the weighted average. We end the paper with an application in a business multi-person decision-making problem regarding production management

Saw-Dmss Model For Intuitionistic Fuzzy Multi Attribute Decision Making Problems

This work introduces a new SAW-DMSS (Simple Additive Weighting-Decision Making Support System) technique for decision-makers to choose the most ideal alternative that has been provided. This also deals with the problem based on SAW algorithm which is a multiple criteria decision making approach with weight determining methods which gives the weights to indicators which is partially or completely unknown or not presented by the decision makers. The SAW algorithm deals with the conflicts between indicators based on certain way to sort the scheme and choose the best scheme. A numerical example is proposed to illustrate the effectiveness of this algorithm. However, comparison of two weight determining methods based on Gaussian distribution and Linguistic quantifier guided aggregation is performed to make the result of evaluations more objective and accurate

GIS multi-criteria analysis by orderedweighted averaging (OWA): Toward an integrated citrus management strategy

This study proposes a site location assessment model for citrus cropland using multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) and the combination of a set of factors for suitability mapping and delineating the suitable areas for citrus production in Ramsar, Iran. It defines an incorporated method for the suitability mapping of the most appropriate sites for citrus cultivars with an emphasis on the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) process. The combination of geographic information system (GIS) and a modified version of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) based on the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) technique is also emphasized. The OWA is based on two principles, namely: the weights of relative criterion significance and the order weights. Therefore, the participatory technique was employed to outline the set of standards and the important criterion. The results derived from the GIS-OWA technique indicate that the cultivation of citrus is feasible only in limited areas, which make up 6.7% of the total area near the Caspian Sea. This investigation has shown that the GIS-OWA model can be integrated into MCDA to select the optimal site for citrus production. The present research highlights how multi-criteria in GIS can play a considerable role in decision making for evaluating the suitability of selected sites for citrus production

Land Use Compatibility Assessment Using a Mdified Topsis Model: a Case Study of Elementary Schools in Tehran

Being one of the most controversial issues in urban planning, land use planning has always been in the focus of researches. Land use planning is a subdivision of urban planning which tends to arrange land uses in order to avoid conflicts among them. In order to achieve a transparent and effective urban planning, land uses should be located and allocated in an ideal situation so that avoid negative impacts from neighbouring parcels and land uses. Neighbouring land uses can produce externalities and negative impacts on other land uses because of inter-land use interaction. These externalities may be undesirable effects such as noise, air and visual pollution or may be caused by hazardous facilities. The main objective of this research is to propose a new multi-criteria evaluation model for land use compatibility assessment. Considering the fact that a considerable number of factors affect the compatibility degree of neighbouring land uses, a multi-criteria evaluation approach is employed to address the aforementioned problem. This research employs the integration of Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) methods to facilitate land use compatibility evaluation with respect to optimism degree. The applicability of the proposed model is illustrated by the problem of land use compatibility assessment for elementary schools in Tehran. The results indicate that most of the current schools are situated in a location which is incompatible for the land use type of elementary school especially in the southern and central parts of the city