Intelligent Multi-Attribute Decision Making Applications: Decision Support Systems for Performance Measurement, Evaluation and Benchmarking

Efficiency has been and continues to be an important attribute of competitive business environments where limited resources exist. Owing to growing complexity of organizations and more broadly, to global economic growth, efficiency considerations are expected to remain a top priority for organizations. Continuous performance evaluations play a significant role in sustaining efficient and effective business processes. Consequently, the literature offers a wide range of performance evaluation methodologies to assess the operational efficiency of various industries. Majority of these models focus solely on quantitative criteria omitting qualitative data. However, a thorough performance measurement and benchmarking require consideration of all available information since accurately describing and defining complex systems require utilization of both data types. Most evaluation models also function under the unrealistic assumption of evaluation criteria being dependent on one another. Furthermore, majority of these methodologies tend to utilize discrete and contemporary information eliminating historical performance data from the model environment. These shortcomings hinder the reliability of evaluation outcomes leading to inadequate performance evaluations for many businesses. This problem gains more significance for business where performance evaluations are tied in to important decisions relating to business expansion, investment, promotion and compensation. The primary purpose of this research is to present a thorough, equitable and accurate evaluation framework for operations management while filling the existing gaps in the literature. Service industry offers a more suitable platform for this study since the industry tend to accommodate both qualitative and quantitative performance evaluation factors relatively with more ease compared to manufacturing due to the intensity of customer (consumer) interaction. Accordingly, a U.S. based food franchise company is utilized for data acquisition and as a case study to demonstrate the applications of the proposed models. Compatible with their multiple criteria nature, performance measurement, evaluation and benchmarking systems require heavy utilization of Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) approaches which constitute the core of this research. In order to be able to accommodate the vagueness in decision making, fuzzy values are also utilized in all proposed models. In the first phase of the study, the main and sub-criteria in the evaluation are considered independently in a hierarchical order and contemporary data is utilized in a holistic approach combining three different multi-criteria decision making methods. The cross-efficiency approach is also introduced in this phase. Building on this approach, the second phase considered the influence of the main and sub-criteria over one another. That is, in the proposed models, the main and sub-criteria form a network with dependencies rather than having a hierarchical relationship. The decision making model is built to extract the influential weights for the evaluation criteria. Furthermore, Group Decision Making (GDM) is introduced to integrate different perspectives and preferences of multiple decision makers who are responsible for different functions in the organization with varying levels of impact on decisions. Finally, an artificial intelligence method is applied to utilize the historical data and to obtain the final performance ranking. Owing to large volumes of data emanating from digital sources, current literature offers a variety of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods for big data analytics applications. Comparing the results generated by the ANNs, three additional well-established methods, viz., Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), are also employed for the same problem. In order to test the prediction capability of these methods, the most influencing criteria are obtained from the data set via Pearson Correlation Analysis and grey relational analysis. Subsequently, the corresponding parameters in each method are optimized via Particle Swarm Optimization to improve the prediction accuracy. The accuracy of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods are heavily reliant on large volumes of data. Despite the fact that several businesses, especially business that utilize social media data or on-line real-time operational data, there are organizations which lack adequate amount of data required for their performance evaluations simply due to the nature of their business. Grey Modeling (GM) technique addresses this issue and provides higher forecasting accuracy in presence of uncertain and limited data. With this motivation, a traditional multi-variate grey model is applied to predict the performance scores. Improved grey models are also applied to compare the results. Finally, the integration of the fractional order accumulation along with the background value coefficient optimization are proposed to improve accuracy

Evolutionary Computation

This book presents several recent advances on Evolutionary Computation, specially evolution-based optimization methods and hybrid algorithms for several applications, from optimization and learning to pattern recognition and bioinformatics. This book also presents new algorithms based on several analogies and metafores, where one of them is based on philosophy, specifically on the philosophy of praxis and dialectics. In this book it is also presented interesting applications on bioinformatics, specially the use of particle swarms to discover gene expression patterns in DNA microarrays. Therefore, this book features representative work on the field of evolutionary computation and applied sciences. The intended audience is graduate, undergraduate, researchers, and anyone who wishes to become familiar with the latest research work on this field

Shortest Route at Dynamic Location with Node Combination-Dijkstra Algorithm

Abstract— Online transportation has become a basic requirement of the general public in support of all activities to go to work, school or vacation to the sights. Public transportation services compete to provide the best service so that consumers feel comfortable using the services offered, so that all activities are noticed, one of them is the search for the shortest route in picking the buyer or delivering to the destination. Node Combination method can minimize memory usage and this methode is more optimal when compared to A* and Ant Colony in the shortest route search like Dijkstra algorithm, but can’t store the history node that has been passed. Therefore, using node combination algorithm is very good in searching the shortest distance is not the shortest route. This paper is structured to modify the node combination algorithm to solve the problem of finding the shortest route at the dynamic location obtained from the transport fleet by displaying the nodes that have the shortest distance and will be implemented in the geographic information system in the form of map to facilitate the use of the system. Keywords— Shortest Path, Algorithm Dijkstra, Node Combination, Dynamic Location (key words