Prioritization of the launch of ICT products and services through linguistic multi-criteria decision-making

The market launch of new products and services is a basic pillar for large and medium-sized companies in the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sector. Choosing the right moment for it is usually a differentiating factor in terms of competition, since it is a source of competitive advantage. There are several mechanisms and strategies to address this problem from the market perspective. However, the criteria of the different actors involved – managers, sales representatives, experts, etc. – coexist in the corporate sphere and they often differ, causing difficulties in priority setting processes in the launch of a product or service. The assessment of the prioritization of these criteria is usually expressed in natural language, thus adding a great deal of uncertainty. Fuzzy linguistic models have proved to be an efficient tool for managing the intrinsic uncertainty of this type of information. This paper presents a linguistic multi-criteria decision-making model, able to reconcile the different requirements and viewpoints existing in the corporate sector when planning the launch of new products and services. The proposed model is based on the fuzzy 2-tuple linguistic model, aimed at managing linguistic data expressing different corporate criteria, without compromising accuracy in the calculation of said data. In order to illustrate this, a practical case study is presented, in which the model is applied for scheduling the launch prioritization of several new products and services by a telecommunications company, within the deadlines set in its strategic planning.The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support received from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) for the Research Projects TIN2016-75850-R, TIN2016-79484-R and TIN2013-40658-P

An agent-based modeling for collective scene criticality assessment in multi-UV systems

In recent years, the role of unmanned vehicles (UVs) is increased in many surveillance applications; they are substituting the humans in many risky activities, especially when cooperative tasks from UV team are required. To this purpose, this paper presents an agent-based framework that models a multi-UV system for surveillance applications. The agents act as wrappers for the different types of UVs, that capture data from the scene (in the area of the UV mission) and then process them, each one according to its own skills and features. The collected and processed data are then shared from the agent team to find a common agreement on the comprehension and criticality assessment of the scenario. The agent paradigm provides a seamless framework for UV interaction, making the different methodologies and technologies, designed for the different UV types, transparent. The proposal shows the agent-based modeling for a multi-UV system, where each agent hides the facilities and features of the UV it wrapped, with the aim of deploying a homogeneous interface to facilitate the collective scenario assessment in terms of critical or alerting issues, detected in the evolving scene