Multicriteria Decision Making for the Choice of the Global System for Mobile Telecommunication

When multiple conflicting criteria are available and must be considered, Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), a subfield of operations research, aids the decision maker in addressing the problem. The use of MCDM, a valuable and effective technique that may be applied in situations of certainty or uncertainty, makes it easier to integrate quantitative and qualitative assessments into scientific procedures. However, many Nigerians are found to retain more than one Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) in response to which of the network providers is best suited to meet their needs. This will help to minimize the number of SIM cards each person will carry, consequently reducing the cost of maintaining them. The aim of this study is to recognize and prioritize the most important mobile service provider criteria in the telecom industry in Borno State, Nigeria. Seven attributes were selected from the literature and customers. Questionnaires were systematically distributed, utilizing convenience and deliberate sampling, to 1200 customers. MTN and AIRTEL are the two most preferred service providers over the other operators within the competitive environment. It is advised that to increase their customer base, service providers in the research region enhance network connectivity, low call rates, and voice clarity

Identifying Heating Technologies suitable for Historic Churches, Taking into Account Heating Strategy and Conservation through Pairwise Analysis

As a result of difficulty meeting energy efficiency through fabric alteration, historic churches must focus on heating systems and operational strategy as key to reducing carbon emissions. Strategies can be defined as local or central heating. Local heating strives to heat occupants, while central heating aims to heat the building fabric and therefore the occupants. Each strategy requires a different approach to control and technology in response to priorities such as conservation, comfort and cost. This paper reviews current and emerging technologies in the context of church heating. The fuel source, heat generation technology and heat emitter are arranged in a matrix, with pairwise analysis undertaken to create weightings for each assessment criteria. The process of constructing the matrix and undertaking pairwise analysis using personas is discussed. The result is a ranking of fuels and technologies appropriate to the main priorities and individual preferences. Some desirable technologies are inherently more damaging to historic church environments due to invasive installation. These technologies score poorly when the aim is fabric preservation. Greener fuels, like biomass, may rank lower than fossil fuels, due in part to operational differences

Incomplete analytic hierarchy process with minimum weighted ordinal violations

Incomplete pairwise comparison matrices offer a natural way of expressing preferences in decision making processes. Although ordinal information is crucial, there is a bias in the literature: cardinal models dominate. Ordinal models usually yield non-unique solutions; therefore, an approach blending ordinal and cardinal information is needed. In this work, we consider two cascading problems: first, we compute ordinal preferences, maximizing an index that combines ordinal and cardinal information; then, we obtain a cardinal ranking by enforcing ordinal constraints. Notably, we provide a sufficient condition (that is likely to be satisfied in practical cases) for the first problem to admit a unique solution and we develop a provably polynomial-time algorithm to compute it. The effectiveness of the proposed method is analyzed and compared with respect to other approaches and criteria at the state of the art.Comment: preprint submitted to the International Journal of General System