EVALUATION OF SWINE ODOR MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN A FUZZY MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION ENVIRONMENT

The paper evaluates swine odor management strategies using the fuzzy extension of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is a multiple criteria decision making approach based on fuzzy scales. The evaluation is conducted using data from our cost effectiveness study of odor management strategies and our on farm studies relating odor to various management practices. These strategies include manual oil sprinkling, automatic oil sprinkling, wet scrubber, diffusion-coagulation-separation (DCS) deduster, pelleting feed, and draining shallow pit weekly. The criteria employed to evaluate the strategies are odor reduction efficiency, costs, nutrients in manure, and other benefits. Two producer profiles are considered: (a) producers who are pressured to achieve maximum reduction in odor emissions; and (b) producers who are constrained with limited financial resources. Both of these profiles are reflective of current situations for some producers. The results show that, as the scale fuzziness decreases, the preference of the first producer profile over the strategies from high to low is DCS deduster, pelleting feed, automatic oil sprinkling, manual oil sprinkling, draining pit weekly, and wet scrubber while the preference of the second producer profile is draining pit weekly, DCS dedusters, automatic oil sprinkling, wet scrubbers, pelleting feed, and manual oil sprinkling.Livestock Production/Industries,

An overview on managing additive consistency of reciprocal preference relations for consistency-driven decision making and Fusion: Taxonomy and future directions

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The reciprocal preference relation (RPR) is a powerful tool to represent decision makers’ preferences in decision making problems. In recent years, various types of RPRs have been reported and investigated, some of them being the ‘classical’ RPRs, interval-valued RPRs and hesitant RPRs. Additive consistency is one of the most commonly used property to measure the consistency of RPRs, with many methods developed to manage additive consistency of RPRs. To provide a clear perspective on additive consistency issues of RPRs, this paper reviews the consistency measurements of the different types of RPRs. Then, consistency-driven decision making and information fusion methods are also reviewed and classified into four main types: consistency improving methods; consistency-based methods to manage incomplete RPRs; consistency control in consensus decision making methods; and consistency-driven linguistic decision making methods. Finally, with respect to insights gained from prior researches, further directions for the research are proposed

Digitizing grey portions of e-governance

Purpose: The purpose of this research paper is to assess e-governance efficacy in various sectors of India. The paper develops on Grey System Theory (GST) methodology and enlightens grey portions of e-governance in select sectors. Research study identifies few grey criteria which affect implementation of information and communication technology (ICT) applications to support sustainable e-governance. Such criteria are related to information security breaches, information technology (IT) policy implementation, investments and strategic advantages for the various sector developments. Design/methodology/approach: Considering “information” as a sensitive element to security for administration and part of dark portion to Indian economy, GST-based COmplex PRroportional ASsessment (COPRAS-G) method is adopted to assess the e-governance efficacy. The method provides flexible multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach to assess e-governance in prioritizing the sector alternatives of future strategic development. Priority order of select sectors is estimated, and COPRAS-G method is used in the research study to support decision-making on e-governance. Study compares ten major gross domestic product-dependent sectors based on few grey criteria. These criteria are chosen based on authors’ perspective on this study and feedback received from government officials of district levels under the Digital India-training programme. To address the subjectivity that lies in e-governance grey areas of sector, criteria are also weighted using fuzzy scale. Later methodology-based results are presented to draw a strategic road map for strategic development of the country. Findings: On applying COPRAS-G method to predict pessimistic, optimistic and realistic scenarios of e-governance implementation across the ten sectors, high priory order in realistic scenario of results shows that implementation of ICT applications for e-governance should be in the sectors such as environment, climate change and in the railways. Industrial sector is also ranked as the preferred one over the other sectors on the basis of e-governance efficacy assessment. Research limitations/implications: Here COPRAS-G method is used as MCDM techniques. However, few other MCDM techniques such as GRA, DRSA, VIKOR, SMAA, SWARA and SAW can be also explored to outrank various Indian sectors to deal with subjectivity in decision-making. Practical implications: Implementation of ICT applications to support e-governance varies from sector to sector. ICT-based governance involves high degree of complexity in driving the operations for development of respective sectors. Therefore, government and policymakers need more flexibility to overcome present barriers of sector development. Such research can support decision-making where GST-based COPRAS-G method is able to capture and address the breaches of information security. Moreover, management concern for sector development has been presented on the basis of pessimistic, optimistic and realistic scenarios more precisely. Social implications: The results can provide guidance to the academicians, policymakers and public sectors highlighting various possible measures to handle the security breaches in multi-facet intention of sustainable development. The outcomes from MCDM framework can also help in drawing a rough trajectory of strategy, i.e. development of ICTs applications and e-governance process. Originality/value: This paper can supplement and act as the support for decision-making in conflicting situations on different flexible scenarios. Moreover, such work can synergize conflicting ideas of decision makers, academics and various other stakeholders of the Indian IT sector

Using interval weights in MADM problems

The choice of weights vectors in multiple attribute decision making (MADM) problems has generated an important literature, and a large number of methods have been proposed for this task. In some situations the decision maker (DM) may not be willing or able to provide exact values of the weights, but this difficulty can be avoided by allowing the DM to give some variability in the weights. In this paper we propose a model where the weights are not fixed, but can take any value from certain intervals, so the score of each alternative is the maximum value that the weighted mean can reach when the weights belong to those intervals. We provide a closed-form expression for the scores achieved by the alternatives so that they can be ranked them without solving the proposed model, and apply this new method to an MADM problem taken from the literature.Este trabajo forma parte del proyecto de investigación: MEC-FEDER Grant ECO2016-77900-P