A multi-criteria decision making approach for priority areas selection in membrane industry for investment promotion: a case study in Iran Marketplace

Membrane technologies for the separation of mixtures have gained an extensive worldwide attraction in the modern industrialized world. They have many industrial and medical applications such as water desalination, wastewater reclamation, gas separation, food and medical applications. However, even though all these applications have their own efficiency and market, the selection of priority applications is very challenging for most developing countries. On the other hand, selecting the optimal priority applications among many alternatives is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. This paper develops an evaluation model based on the AHP and TOPSIS methods for evaluating and ranking membrane applications effectively. The AHP is used to analyze the structure of the selection problem and to determine the weights of the evaluating criteria. It is also used for evaluating the decision-making team members to determine the relative importance of each one of them. A modified technique is proposed to improve the consistency of judgment matrices; then Individual judgments are aggregated by using the weighted geometric mean to obtain the weights of criteria. The modified technique increases the accuracy of decisionmaking process and saves time to obtain consistent judgment matrices. Finally, the TOPSIS method is employed to calculate the final ranking of the membrane applications. For evaluating the performance and reliability of the proposed model, it is applied in a real case in IRAN.