55,355 research outputs found

    Using clustering methods to deal with high number of alternatives on Group Decision Making

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    Novel Group Decision Making methods and Web 2.0 have augmented the quantity of data that experts have to discuss about. Nevertheless, experts are only capable of dealing with a reduced set of information. In this paper, a novel method for dealing with decision environments that include a large set of alternatives is presented. By the use of clustering methods, the available alternatives are combined into clusters according to their similarity. Afterwards, one Group Decision Making process is employed for choosing a cluster and another one for selecting the final alternative.The authors would like to thank the FEDER financial support for the Project TIN2016-75850-P by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

    Multi-Criteria Analysis in Compound Decision Processes. The AHP and the Architectural Competition for the Chamber of Deputies in Rome (Italy)

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    In 1967, a national architectural competition was released for a preliminary project proposal, aimed at the realization of the new building for the Chamber of Deputies in Rome. The outcomes of that competition were unusual: eighteen projects were declared joint winners, and no winner was consequently selected. With reference to that event, this research aims to examine the usefulness of the evaluation tools that are currently employed and the positive effects that one of these techniques would have had, as support for the identification of the “winner” project, are highlighted. Therefore, an hypothetical examination/adjustment of the decision process of that competition through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is developed, analyzing the outputs obtained by the implementations of this technique on the final decision. In addition to confirming the usefulness of the evaluation tools for compound and conflicting decision processes, the results of this experiment led to a further understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics related to the original outcomes of the competition analyzed. View Full-Tex

    Multi-criteria analysis applied to multi-objective optimal pump scheduling in water systems

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    This work presents a multi-criteria-based approach to automatically select specific non-dominated solutions from a Pareto front previously obtained using multi-objective optimization to find optimal solutions for pump control in a water supply system. Optimal operation of pumps in these utilities is paramount to enable water companies to achieve energy efficiency in their systems. The Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS) is used to rank the Pareto solutions found by the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) employed to solve the multi-objective problem. Various scenarios are evaluated under leakage uncertainty conditions, resulting in fuzzy solutions for the Pareto front. This paper shows the suitability of the approach for quasi real-world problems. In our case-study, the obtained solutions for scenarios including leakage represent the best trade-off among the optimal solutions, under some considered criteria, namely, operational cost, operational lack of service, pressure uniformity and network resilience. Potential future developments could include the use of clustering alternatives to evaluate the goodness of each solution under the considered evaluation criteria

    E-tailers versus Retailers: Which Factors Determine Consumer Preferences

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    The growth of Internet technology and electronic commerce has not been matched by theoretically-guided social science research. Clear and well designed consumer research is needed to describe, explain, and predict what will happen to this changing landscape. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the structure for consumer preferences to make product purchases through three available retail formats - store, catalog, and the Internet. Conjoint analysis was used to assess the structure of the decision and the importance of the attributes in the decision-making process. The results from this study noticeably show that the structure of the consumer decision-making process was found to be primarily one of choosing the retail format (store, catalog, or Internet) and price of product (set at low, medium or high) desired. The strength of the retail store format suggests that fears that the Internet will take over the retail arena seem, at least at this point in time, overblown and exaggerated. However, there seems to be an identifiable segment of customers that has a preference for the Internet as a retail shopping alternative.Economics ;

    Virtual cluster scheduling through the scheduling graph

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    This paper presents an instruction scheduling and cluster assignment approach for clustered processors. The proposed technique makes use of a novel representation named the scheduling graph which describes all possible schedules. A powerful deduction process is applied to this graph, reducing at each step the set of possible schedules. In contrast to traditional list scheduling techniques, the proposed scheme tries to establish relations among instructions rather than assigning each instruction to a particular cycle. The main advantage is that wrong or poor schedules can be anticipated and discarded earlier. In addition, cluster assignment of instructions is performed using another novel concept called virtual clusters, which define sets of instructions that must execute in the same cluster. These clusters are managed during the deduction process to identify incompatibilities among instructions. The mapping of virtual to physical clusters is postponed until the scheduling of the instructions has finalized. The advantages this novel approach features include: (1) accurate scheduling information when assigning, and, (2) accurate information of the cluster assignment constraints imposed by scheduling decisions. We have implemented and evaluated the proposed scheme with superblocks extracted from Speclnt95 and MediaBench. The results show that this approach produces better schedules than the previous state-of-the-art. Speed-ups are up to 15%, with average speed-ups ranging from 2.5% (2-Clusters) to 9.5% (4-Clusters).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

    Managing Group Decision Making criteria values using Fuzzy Ontologies

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    Meeting: 8th International Conference on Information Technology and Quantitative Management (ITQM) - Developing Global Digital Economy after COVID-19Most of the available Multi-criteria Group Decision Making methods that deal with a high number of elements usually focus on managing scenarios that have high number of alternatives and/or experts. Nevertheless, there are also cases in which the number of criteria values is difficult for the experts to tackle. In this paper, a novel Group Decision Making method that employs Fuzzy Ontologies in order to deal with a high number of criteria values is presented. Our method allows the criteria values to be combined in order to generate a reduced set of criteria values that the experts can comfortably deal with. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.The authors would like to thank the Spanish State Research Agency through the project PID2019-103880RB-I00 / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033
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