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

Multi crteria decision making and its applications : a literature review

This paper presents current techniques used in Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and their applications. Two basic approaches for MCDM, namely Artificial Intelligence MCDM (AIMCDM) and Classical MCDM (CMCDM) are discussed and investigated. Recent articles from international journals related to MCDM are collected and analyzed to find which approach is more common than the other in MCDM. Also, which area these techniques are applied to. Those articles are appearing in journals for the year 2008 only. This paper provides evidence that currently, both AIMCDM and CMCDM are equally common in MCDM

Prioritization of petroleum supply chains’ disruption management strategies using combined framework of BSC approach, fuzzy AHP and fuzzy Choquet integral operator

Industries in every sector have observed tangible losses from a broad range of disruptions during recent years. Factors such as globalization and outsourcing have made supply chains more sophisticated and this makes disruption management more necessary. Any disruption in each part of supply chain makes the whole supply chain face derangement and at last, ultimate customers realize the shaped disadvantages. Since avoidance of disruption occurrence is not always possible, application of different strategies with the aid of minimization of negative effects seems necessary. That is why in this paper, different strategies for disruption management in petroleum products supply chain and suitable criteria for prioritizing them are recognized via Balanced Score Card approach measures. After that, by application of fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process and intuitionistic fuzzy Choquet integral operator, their priorities are specified in order to make a guideline for managers to set proper plans and manage such disruptions more accurately

A multi-attribute decision making procedure using fuzzy numbers and hybrid aggregators

The classical Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) has two limitations. Firstly, it disregards the aspect of uncertainty that usually embedded in the data or information expressed by human. Secondly, it ignores the aspect of interdependencies among attributes during aggregation. The application of fuzzy numbers aids in confronting the former issue whereas, the usage of Choquet Integral operator helps in dealing with the later issue. However, the application of fuzzy numbers into multi-attribute decision making (MADM) demands some additional steps and inputs from decision maker(s). Similarly, identification of monotone measure weights prior to employing Choquet Integral requires huge number of computational steps and amount of inputs from decision makers, especially with the increasing number of attributes. Therefore, this research proposed a MADM procedure which able to reduce the number of computational steps and amount of information required from the decision makers when dealing with these two aspects simultaneously. To attain primary goal of this research, five phases were executed. First, the concept of fuzzy set theory and its application in AHP were investigated. Second, an analysis on the aggregation operators was conducted. Third, the investigation was narrowed on Choquet Integral and its associate monotone measure. Subsequently, the proposed procedure was developed with the convergence of five major components namely Factor Analysis, Fuzzy-Linguistic Estimator, Choquet Integral, Mikhailov‘s Fuzzy AHP, and Simple Weighted Average. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed procedure was verified by solving a real MADM problem where the image of three stores located in Sabak Bernam, Selangor, Malaysia was analysed from the homemakers‘ perspective. This research has a potential in motivating more decision makers to simultaneously include uncertainties in human‘s data and interdependencies among attributes when solving any MADM problems

Investigation on Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods Application in Sustainable Product Design

Background: Integrating sustainability development' aspects in the design process is becoming, a growth area in companies. Consequently, sustainable product design has to consider the different aspects of sustainability throughout its life cycle phases in addition of other requirements. This integration is becoming more complicated due the difficulty of managing the constraints and alternatives related to the product and stakeholders needs. This study aims to highlights the most used Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tools and methods used in sustainable product design process. Contribution: Product design process involves interesting decisional tasks such as the choice of materials, standard parts, technical solutions. Hence, the contribution of this work is to help designer to adopt relevant MCDM tools and methods that can be integrated to other tools to facilitate and to justify their decisional tasks. Method: Several methods have been affected to solve the problems related to this complexity such as MCDM. A literature review was conducted based on Siencedirect and GoogleScholar articles databases. After filtering more than 200 articles only 62 articles were considered to analyze the correlation between sustainable product design and MCDM. Results: Classified MCDM use according to the type of choices to achieve SPD goals. This paper allowed us to find matches between MCDM methods and SPD problem. The majority of case studies result show that a large portion of sustainable design methods, techniques, and tools are applied to the sustainable product’ along its different life cycle phases Conclusion: It is noticed that the use of MCDM methods are an important outcome in the sustainable product design process and deeply helps designers to make suitable choices. Also, several matches relating MCDM, other methods and sustainable product design sphere are discusse

Supplier selection with support vector regression and twin support vector regression

Tedarikçi seçimi sorunu son zamanlarda literatürde oldukça ilgi görmektedir. Güncel literatür, yapay zeka tekniklerinin geleneksel istatistiksel yöntemlerle karşılaştırıldığında daha iyi bir performans sağladığını göstermektedir. Son zamanlarda, destek vektör makinesi, araştırmacılar tarafından çok daha fazla ilgi görse de, buna dayalı tedarikçi seçimi çalışmalarına pek sık rastlanmamaktadır. Bu çalışmada, tedarikçi kredi endeksini tahmin etmek amacıyla, destek vektör regresyon (DVR) ve ikiz destek vektör regresyon (İDVR) teknikleri kullanılmıştır. Pratikte, tedarikçi verisini içeren örneklemler sayıca oldukça yetersizdir. DVR ve İDVR daha küçük örneklemlerle analiz yapmaya uyarlanabilir. Tedarikçilerin belirlenmesinde DVR ve İDVR yöntemlerinin tahmin kesinlikleri karşılaştırılmıştır. Gerçek örnekler İDVR yönteminin DVR yöntemine kıyasla üstün olduğunu göstermektedir.Suppliers’ selection problem has attracted considerable research interest in recent years. Recent literature show that artificial intelligence techniques achieve better performance than traditional statistical methods. Recently, support vector machine has received much more attention from researchers, while studies on supplier selection based on it are few. In this paper, we applied the support vector regression (SVR) and twin support vector regression (TSVR) techniques to predict the supplier credit index. In practice, the suppliers’ samples are very insufficient. SVR and TSVR are adaptive to deal with small samples. The prediction accuracies for SVR and TSVR methods are compared to choose appropriate suppliers. The actual examples illustrate that TSVR methods are superior to SVR

Research on supply chain partner selection and task allocation based on fuzzy theory under an uncertain environment

Nowadays the enterprises pay the closer attention to the relationship among suppliers, manufacturers and distributors due to the global competitive market economy. And they manage the supply chain through establishing strategic cooperative partnership, which can greatly enhance the competitive advantage and obtain greater overall profits. In this paper, the fuzzy theory is applied to study the supply chain partner selection and the task coarse allocation problem in under multi-attribute fuzzy comprehensive decision-making and fuzzy constraints. Finally, the fuzzy comprehensive decision of supply chain network structure was verified through the case of Shaoxing textile.Hoy en día las empresas prestan más atención a la relación entre proveedores, fabricantes y distribuidores debido a la competitiva economía de mercado global. Y manejan la cadena de suministro a través del establecimiento de una asociación estratégica de cooperación, que puede mejorar en gran medida la ventaja competitiva y obtener mayores beneficios en general. En este artículo, la teoría difusa se aplica para estudiar la selección de socios de la cadena de suministro y el problema de asignación de tareas gruesas en la toma de decisiones globales difusas de múltiples atributo y las restricciones difusas. Por último, la decisión global difusa de la estructura de la red de la cadena de suministro se verificó a través del caso de Shaoxing textil

Supplier evaluation and selection in fuzzy environments: a review of MADM approaches

In past years, the multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) approaches have been extensively applied by researchers to the supplier evaluation and selection problem. Many of these studies were performed in an uncertain environment described by fuzzy sets. This study provides a review of applications of MADM approaches for evaluation and selection of suppliers in a fuzzy environment. To this aim, a total of 339 publications were examined, including papers in peer-reviewed journals and reputable conferences and also some book chapters over the period of 2001 to 2016. These publications were extracted from many online databases and classified in some categories and subcategories according to the MADM approaches, and then they were analysed based on the frequency of approaches, number of citations, year of publication, country of origin and publishing journals. The results of this study show that the AHP and TOPSIS methods are the most popular approaches. Moreover, China and Taiwan are the top countries in terms of number of publications and number of citations, respectively. The top three journals with highest number of publications were: Expert Systems with Applications, International Journal of Production Research and The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology

VIKOR Technique:A Systematic Review of the State of the Art Literature on Methodologies and Applications

The main objective of this paper is to present a systematic review of the VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method in several application areas such as sustainability and renewable energy. This study reviewed a total of 176 papers, published in 2004 to 2015, from 83 high-ranking journals; most of which were related to Operational Research, Management Sciences, decision making, sustainability and renewable energy and were extracted from the “Web of Science and Scopus” databases. Papers were classified into 15 main application areas. Furthermore, papers were categorized based on the nationalities of authors, dates of publications, techniques and methods, type of studies, the names of the journals and studies purposes. The results of this study indicated that more papers on VIKOR technique were published in 2013 than in any other year. In addition, 13 papers were published about sustainability and renewable energy fields. Furthermore, VIKOR and fuzzy VIKOR methods, had the first rank in use. Additionally, the Journal of Expert Systems with Applications was the most significant journal in this study, with 27 publications on the topic. Finally, Taiwan had the first rank from 22 nationalities which used VIKOR technique