Incorporating stakeholders’ knowledge in group decision-making

International audienc

Research on Innovation and Strategic Risk Management in Manufacturing Firms

Chinese manufacturing companies in Bangladesh are committed to achieving optimal investment policy for investors in different industries. The purpose of this research is the strategic risk assessment; where the research approach involves collecting qualitative data through questionnaire survey and compute variables with programmed Rough Set Theory. Researchers have identified a set of key internal and external strategic uncertainties and also accessed the most important attributes from strategic risks. Here, Sector regulation, changing the tax law and organizational governance as the most degree of risk factors in strategic risk analysis. Overall, the focus of our research is to identify strategic risk attributes and proposed a risk assessment framework by demonstrating empirical study analysis of specific industries in Bangladesh those are directly invested by Chinese investors

The Application of Dominance-based Rough Sets Theory to Evaluation of Transportation Systems

AbstractThe paper presents an original procedure of evaluation of a transportation system, resulting in its assignment into a predefined class, representing the overall standard of the considered system and the level of transportation service. The method relies on the application of the dominance-based rough set theory (DRST), allows for thorough data exploration, evaluation of informational content of the considered characteristics and generation of certain decision rules that support t he evaluation process. In the analysis different characteristics (criteria and attributes) describing various aspects of a transportation system operations are taken into account. The assignment of a transportation system to a specific quality class is performed based on the values of characteristics which are compared with the evaluation pattern, i.e. the set of decision rules generated through the analysis of customers’ opinions and expectations concerning a transportation system. The method is composed of three major steps, including: 1) identification of the most important characteristics, 2) generation of the evaluation pattern, and 3) assignment of the transportation system to the appropriate class. In the evaluation process five key components of a transportation system, including: transportation means, human resources, informational resources, transportation infrastructure and technical equipment as well as organizational rules are considered

Transformation Paradox: A Framework for the Analysis of Politics in Enterprise Transformations

The purpose of this research is to develop a theoretical framework for the analysis of politics in enterprise transformations using a dialectical analysis approach (Hegel, 1989; Heraclitus, 1979; Pinkard, 1988; Skinner, 1978a, 1978b) and conduct an evaluation of the framework validity. The framework is constructed using a dialectical analysis of concepts stemming from the work of Alford and Friedland (1992) and considers four theoretical perspectives: autocratic, bureaucratic, pluralistic, and cognitive. The framework is then validated by means of qualitative metrics and adherence to critical ideology. This research addresses the problem that there is no holistic theoretical framework for the analysis of politics across the systemic, situational, and structural contexts found in enterprise transformations. Politics occurs at multiple levels in the enterprise making it difficult to identify the salient issues that need to be addressed in support of transformation. Transformations can be paradoxical as enterprises revert to the dominant paradigm that affirms present realities rather than developing a critical posture to break the constraining paradigm. The dialectical approach used embraces the power of multiple theoretical perspectives in the transformation process, asserting that theories have power over actions, behaviors, and language. The theoretical framework allows for the simultaneous existence of shifting states of cooperation, frustration, and paradigmatic hegemony over systemic, situational, and structural contexts that embody politics in enterprise transformations. Rough set theory is used to demonstrate the ability of the framework to be adaptive and to evolve based on the inclusion of new data. I conclude that the deployment of an evolving framework of this magnitude may have a significant impact on the management of transformation efforts and suggest new areas of research to further the work

Analysis of monotonicity properties of some rule interestingness measures

One of the crucial problems in the field of knowledge discovery is development of good interestingness measures for evaluation of the discovered patterns. In this paper, we consider quantitative, objective interestingness measures for "if..., then... " association rules. We focus on three popular interestingness measures, namely rule interest function of Piatetsky-Shapiro, gain measure of Fukuda et al., and dependency factor used by Pawlak. We verify whether they satisfy the valuable property M of monotonic dependency on the number of objects satisfying or not the premise or the conclusion of a rule, and property of hypothesis symmetry (HS). Moreover, analytically and through experiments we show an interesting relationship between those measures and two other commonly used measures of rule support and anti-support

Social sustainable supplier evaluation and selection: a group decision-support approach

Organisational and managerial decisions are influenced by corporate sustainability pressures. Organisations need to consider economic, environmental and social sustainability dimensions in their decisions to become sustainable. Supply chain decisions play a distinct and critical role in organisational good and service outputs sustainability. Sustainable supplier selection influences the supply chain sustainability allowing many organisations to build competitive advantage. Within this context, the social sustainability dimension has received relatively minor investigation; with emphasis typically on economic and environmental sustainability. Neglecting social sustainability can have serious repercussions for organisational supply chains. This study proposes a social sustainability attribute decision framework to evaluate and select socially sustainable suppliers. A grey-based multi-criteria decision-support tool composed of the ‘best-worst method’ (BWM) and TODIM (TOmada de Decisão Interativa e Multicritério – in Portuguese ‘Interactive and Multicriteria Decision Making’) is introduced. A grey-BWM approach is used to determine social sustainability attribute weights, and a grey-TODIM method is utilised to rank suppliers. This process is completed in a group decision setting. A case study of an Iranian manufacturing company is used to exemplify the applicability and suitability of the proposed social sustainability decision framework. Managerial implications, limitations, and future research directions are introduced after the application of the model

Robust ordinal regression for value functions handling interacting criteria

International audienceWe present a new method called UTAGMS–INT for ranking a finite set of alternatives evaluated on multiple criteria. It belongs to the family of Robust Ordinal Regression (ROR) methods which build a set of preference models compatible with preference information elicited by the Decision Maker (DM). The preference model used by UTAGMS–INT is a general additive value function augmented by two types of components corresponding to ‘‘bonus’’ or ‘‘penalty’’ values for positively or negatively interacting pairs of criteria, respectively. When calculating value of a particular alternative, a bonus is added to the additive component of the value function if a given pair of criteria is in a positive synergy for performances of this alternative on the two criteria. Similarly, a penalty is subtracted from the additive component of the value function if a given pair of criteria is in a negative synergy for performances of the considered alternative on the two criteria. The preference information elicited by the DM is composed of pairwise comparisons of some reference alternatives, as well as of comparisons of some pairs of reference alternatives with respect to intensity of preference, either comprehensively or on a particular criterion. In UTAGMS–INT, ROR starts with identification of pairs of interacting criteria for given preference information by solving a mixed-integer linear program. Once the interacting pairs are validated by the DM, ROR continues calculations with the whole set of compatible value functions handling the interacting criteria, to get necessary and possible preference relations in the considered set of alternatives. A single representative value function can be calculated to attribute specific scores to alternatives. It also gives values to bonuses and penalties. UTAGMS–INT handles quite general interactions among criteria and provides an interesting alternative to the Choquet integral