Burak Omer Saracoglu

Selecting industrial investment locations in master plans of countries

The plans for industries of a country can be organised based on the top down philosophy as the strategic, master and regional plans. These plans should be supported by some sector and company plans such as the business plans and the investment plans. All these business and management tools should essentially be linked or associated with each other by the intelligent systems. The objective of this paper is to solve one of the crucial problems in the industrial master plans, the industrial investment location selection. One of the government budgeted programmes in Turkey aims to search, find, define, investigate, select and decide new candidate locations of new building shipyards in Turkey. This study presents a new decision support procedure based on AHP for the location selection problems in master plans. Finally, some of the new building shipyard zone location alternatives, based on the cluster philosophy in Turkey, have been presented. [Received 16 May 2011; Revised 27 September 2011; 27 November 2011; Accepted 29 November 2011]

An Experimental Research Study on the Solution of a Private Small Hydropower Plant Investments Selection Problem by ELECTRE III/IV, Shannon’s Entropy, and Saaty’s Subjective Criteria Weighting

Almost all of the today’s modern daily life conditions of humankind depend on the electricity. The countries either by only themselves or sometimes with some international intuitions and/or organizations have been trying to find the best methods, ways, and projects to supply the electricity to their societies. One of the important tools for the countries to increase the amount and quality of the electricity generation is to activate/ignite/initiate the private investment capabilities/opportunities. The electricity generation market in Turkey is a free/open market for both the foreign and domestic private investors. Hence, both the foreign and domestic private investors have been looking for the most suitable electricity generation plant projects. Small hydropower plant (SHPP) investments (SHPPIs) are one of the alternatives in the Turkish electricity generation market especially for the private investors searching for the renewable energy investments. This experimental research study investigates the possibility of using the ELECTRE III/IV, Shannon’s Entropy, and Saaty’s Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) subjective weighting (for criteria) methods for the solution of this problem. In the experimental case study, the most appropriate SHPPIs amongst five alternative SHPPIs at the SHPPIs’ predevelopment investment stages in Turkey were evaluated and ranked in order.

Identification of Technology Performance Criteria for CAD/CAM/CAE/CIM/CAL in Shipbuilding Industry

There has been considerable activity regarding the current computer-aided design, computer aided manufacturing, computer aided engineering, computer integrated manufacturing, computer aided lofting {CAD/CAM/CAE/CIM/CAL (C5)} capabilities in the past five years in shipbuilding industry. There are a huge number of reports and papers that provide a detailed description of the deployments at yards, including items such as the network infrastructure, operating systems, databases, and C5 capabilities of yards. However, none of them defines performance criteria for the selection of technology. The objective of this paper is to identify the performance criteria for the C5 technologies in shipbuilding industry, which is a traditionally managed and a highly design related custom-made production process. In this pursuit, two basic questions have been asked: 1) in what ways do firms decide to implement a certain technology? 2) after implementing the selected technology and software how do they decide about their level of satisfaction? Two major groups of C5 performance criteria have been identified and a model is illustrated as a result of performing forty worldwide interviews. Finally, the major groups of C5 technology performance criteria are weighted

A comparative study of selected multi-criteria decision-making methodologies for location selection of very large concentrated solar power plants in Nigeria

This work studies the location selection of very large concentrated solar power plants (VLCSPPs) in Nigeria using five Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methodologies including: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Consistency-Driven Pairwise Comparisons (CDPC), Decision Expert for Education (DEXi), Elimination and Choice Translating Reality (ELECTRE) III and IV. A comparative investigation is performed on only one unique model that is structured in four levels. This model has nine basic factors (Direct Normal Irradiance, grid infrastructure, climatic conditions, water availability conditions, natural disaster/hazard conditions, topographical conditions, geological conditions, land use, allocation and availability, war, terror & security conditions) taken from previous factors selection studies. There are 35 alternatives for the VLCSPP locations in Nigeria for the pre-development investment stage and are presented on Google Earth file (GE). The Super Decisions, JConcluder, DEXi and ELECTRE III-IV software are mainly used in this study. The findings show that the AHP and CDPC rankings are very close to each other. On the other hand, the DEXi, ELECTRE III and IV rankings spread very much amongst the methods. Hence, a small procedural rule is defined for the selection of candidate locations for detailed investigations. Several candidates’ VLCSPP locations were found to exist as alternatives, with approximate local central coordinates of 13°38′55.37″N, 13°20′41.41″E and 13°6′58.83″N, 13°26′53.63″E in Nigeria. These should be further investigated in the following investment stages.