Multi criteria decision making methods for location selection of distribution centers

In recent years, major challenges such as, increase in inflexible consumer demands and to improve the competitive advantage, it has become necessary for various industrial organizations all over the world to focus on strategies that will help them achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer satisfaction and on time delivery performance. As a result, selection of the most suitable and optimal facility location for a new organization or expansion of an existing location is one of the most important strategic issues, required to fulfill all of these above mentioned objectives. In order to sustain in the global competitive market of 21st century, many industrial organizations have begun to concentrate on the proper selection of the plant site or best facility location. The best location is that which results in higher economic benefits through increased productivity and good distribution network. When a choice is to be made from among several alternative facility locations, it is necessary to compare their performance characteristics in a decisive way. As the facility location selection problem involves multiple conflicting criteria and a finite set of potential candidate alternatives, different multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods can be effectively applied to solve such type of problem. In this paper, four well known MCDM methods have been applied on a facility location selection problem and their relative ranking performances are compared. Because of disagreement in the ranks obtained by the four different MCDM methods a final ranking method based on REGIME has been proposed by the authors to facilitate the decision making process

At Home with Durga: The Goddess in a Palace and Corporeal Identity in Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab

In this article, I examine the representational strategies used to visualize the pratima (deity) of the Hindu goddess, Durga, as a paradigm of time, memory, and corporeal identity, in Rituparno Ghosh’s 2000 Bengali film Utsab. I analyze the body as a dynamic site of memory-formation that shapes new histories in the sprawling colonial palace in which the film’s narrative unfolds with an ancestral Durga festival as its focal point. To this end, I look at how the body of the goddess produces and defines the transience of human experience, the fragility of material history, and the desire for historic relevance

L’India nella musica e nella cultura pop. Cronologia di un’utopia transculturale

L'influsso della cultura e delle tradizioni musicali indiane sulla musica afroamericana e sulla popular music degli anni Cinquanta-Sessanta del XX secolo ha prodotto numerose esperienze di interculturalità, fallendo però quasi sempre i propri obiettivi sul piano della transculturalità. Il fenomeno viene storicizzato a partire dalla ricostruzione delle influenze diffuse dai grandi divulgatori del pensiero e della musica indostana nel Novecento euroamericano, e degli incontri, anche personali, tra maestri indiani come Ravi Shankar e artisti europei e afroamericani come i Beatles e John Coltrane