Y. Esra Albayrak

WEEE treatment strategies' evaluation using fuzzy LINMAP method

Electrical and electronic equipments (EEE) have already begun to be accumulated at the garbage dumps. This garbage accumulation brings big danger to the environment and human health. Thats why one should look for exploring the ways to dispose of these wastes and emphasize the waste treatment strategies. Waste treatment strategies also contribute either to local or global economies by creating a new sector and employment opportunities, and by reducing use of scarce resources. In this paper, a linear programming technique for multidimensional analysis of preference (LINMAP) method for solving multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems with preference information on alternatives in fuzzy environment is developed. The aim is to develop a fuzzy LINMAP model for evaluation and select of a waste treatment strategy for EEE. Thus, three treatment strategy alternatives and eight criteria are determined. The best strategy is selected and the key criterion is found accordingly. The best alternative is found to be treating waste electrical and electronic equipments (WEEE) by reuse and recycling methods.

An engineering approach to human resources performance evaluation: Hybrid MCDM application with interactions

Abstract Human performance evaluation is one of the most important fields to analyze for the continuity of an organization. Evaluation files filled by the managers generally end up in dusty folders where no one looks. This decreases the credibility of the evaluators and the process itself. Whereas the management thinks that they are taking the valuable time from the people who can do better things instead of these evaluations. In this paper, we add an engineering point of view to this process by giving a Hybrid Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach to evaluate employees’ performances working for a same task and explain an efficient way of handling the qualitative and quantitative data simultaneously. The real life situations where performance criteria show interaction will be possible to solve and the different types of interactions will be handled with the proposed hybrid method using Analytical Network Process (ANP) and Choquet Integral (CI) simultaneously. We also give a numerical illustration at the end of the study with the appropriate concluding remarks including the advantages of the proposed method.

Petri net based decision system modeling in real-time scheduling and control of flexible automotive manufacturing systems

High level Petri nets and object-oriented design approaches have been presented.PN based method is adapted to the flexible automotive manufacturing system (FAMS).PN based method is illustrated by modeling a real-time scheduling and control for FAMS.The method formulates the dynamic behavior of the system.Artifex PN software tool is employed to model the system. This paper presents the design and the implementation of a Petri net (PN) model for the control of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). A flexible automotive manufacturing system used in this environment enables quick cell configuration, and the efficient operation of cells. In this paper, we attempt to propose a flexible automotive manufacturing approach for modeling and analysis of shop floor scheduling problem of FMSs using high-level PNs. Since PNs have emerged as the principal performance modeling tools for FMS, this paper provides an object-oriented Petri nets (OOPNs) approach to performance modeling and to implement efficient production control. In this study, we modeled the system as a timed marked graph (TMG), a well-known subclass of PNs, and we showed that the problem of performance evaluation can be reduced to a simple linear programming (LP) problem with m-n+1 variables and n constraints, where m and n represent the number of places and transitions in the marked graph, respectively. The presented PN based method is illustrated by modeling a real-time scheduling and control for flexible automotive manufacturing system (FAMS) in Valeo Turkey.

Criteria Weighting and 4P's Planning in Marketing Using a Fuzzy Metric Distance and AHP Hybrid Method

AbstractProduction and consumption relationship shows that marketing plays an important role in enterprises. In the competitive market, it is very important to be able to sell rather than produce. Nowadays, marketing is customer- oriented and aims to meet the needs and expectations of customers to increase their satisfaction. While creating a marketing strategy, an enterprise must consider many factors. Which is why, the process can and should be considered as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) case. In this study, marketing strategies and marketing decisions in the new-product-development process has been analyzed in a macro level. To deal quantitatively with imprecision or uncertainty, fuzzy sets theory has been used throughout the analysis.

Leveraging technological knowledge transfer by using fuzzy linear programming technique for multiattribute group decision making with fuzzy decision variables

Despite the importance of knowledge transfer for firms involved in foreign direct investment activities, this area has not received appropriate attention from the perspectives of both the knowledge transferor (i.e., MNC parent) and the knowledge recipient. To fill in the gap in the current literature we propose a model to understand the links between criteria complicating the transfer of knowledge and preferences that the company has to focus. This model is based on both the existing literature as well as views of company representatives and provides a useful methodology for identifying decision making problems on the transfer of knowledge. In this paper, we investigate the fuzzy linear programming technique (FLP) to analyze these links and for multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems with preference information on criteria. To reflect the decision maker’s subjective preference information and to determine the weight vector of attributes, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) developed by Hwang and Yoon (1995) and the linear programming technique for multidimensional analysis of preference (LINMAP) developed by Sirinivasan and Shocker (Psychometrica 38:337–369, 1973) are used.

An Analytic Network Process approach to the planning and managing of the energy politics

The obtainment of electricity in a cheap, reliable and stable way on time with good quality is of high priority for the management of countries. In order to do so, in our country where the need to electrical energy is rapidly increasing, the planning of production and development of electrical energy and its execution is very important from the economical point of view. However, the analysis of the final consumption of the country, the determination of all the factors affecting the final demand, is a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem which requires taking several different factors in account. In this study, the determination of the scenarios of the socio-economic and technique development and the problem of evaluating the values calculated for these scenarios will be solved with Analytic Network Process (ANP)s software SuperDecisions which will provide more accurate results by taking the relations between the evaluation factors into account. The results will be evaluated and their conformity to this process will be researched.

Criteria evaluation for pricing decisions in strategic marketing management using an intuitionistic cognitive map approach

Marketing decisions are challenging in profit-oriented companies because of their complex nature. Many factors influence the marketing strategy in the new product development (NPD) process. With this aspect, strategic marketing decisions for launching a product to the market can be observed as multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems. This study proposes a novel approach called intuitionistic cognitive map (ICM), for assessing the criteria that influence the pricing strategy of a company in earlier stages of the product’s life cycle in the market. A framework is formed based on a profound analysis of literature and experts’ opinions, in terms of criteria affecting pricing strategy and the causal relationships between them. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets and cognitive mapping are used together to capture the hesitation of the decision makers caused by lack of information and to define cause-and-effect relations between the criteria to represent the complexity of strategic marketing decisions. Contrary to conventional MCDM methods that require complete data, ICM method is able to deal with lack of information and hesitancy of the decision makers. In addition, ICM method has a new feature called “the coefficient of synergy” incorporating the synergy effect of the application field in the model. The case study is conducted in a technological-device-manufacturing company. Seventeen factors that influence the company’s pricing decisions are determined and evaluated with three marketing experts, and in the numerical application, brand image, market share, consumer fidelity, market/segment size, and new product capability criteria had the maximum positive influence on pricing decisions.

Construction of Intuitionistic Fuzzy Cognitive Maps for Target Marketing Strategy Decisions

Shopping malls today, are the centers of social life. There exists an increasing demand of shopping malls. The market’s profit margin is promising however from the investor’s perspective, shopping malls require big investments and the risk level is high. For the success of a shopping mall, its target market needs to be chosen carefully in the beginning and its marketing mix needs to be in the same direction. There exist many factors influencing the target market strategy selection of a shopping mall; this process can be observed as an MCDM problem. The purpose of this study is to determine the interrelations between the criteria affecting a shopping mall’s target market differentiation degree, to select a target marketing strategy while considering the hesitations of decision makers and to represent this complex decision making system with intuitionistic fuzzy cognitive maps. Numerical application is made for investment decision making process of a new shopping mall that will locate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Facility Location Selection Employing Fuzzy DEA and Fuzzy Goal Programming Techniques

Facility location selection have strategic importance for companies because it influences not only manufacturing and transportation costs but also productivity and lead times to a great extend. Additionally, it is considered as hard and complicated tasks with respect to its multi-objective nature and difficulties resulted from collecting necessary data. Therefore this problem has always been an important subject of engineering literature. The aim of this study is to solve a facility location selection problem in a manufacturing company that locates in Tekirdag/Turkey. This company has six different factories in the same facility and is considering about establishing a plastic injection factory in the future for producing some of the important plastic components in order to gain cost advantage and also to increase know-how. For this purpose, facility location selection problem is aimed to be solved by applying fuzzy data envelopment analysis (Fuzzy DEA) and fuzzy goal programming (Fuzzy GP) methods.

Application of fuzzy AHP to evaluate knowledge based human resource flexibility

Abstract Human resources are one of the main sources of flexibility. In many manufacturing systems human resources are the most expensive, but also the most flexible factors. Therefore, the optimal utilization of human resources is an important success factor contributing to long-term competitiveness. Thus, how to build a knowledge-oriented human resource system and form an appropriate culture, which is suitable for knowledge management, has become one of the most important issues for a company. This paper proposes a fuzzy multicriteria decision making (FMCDM) model to solve the problem of evaluating the knowledge based human resource flexibility.