This chapter outlines an intelligent fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model for appropriate selection of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) in a conflicting criteria environment. A holistic methodology has been developed for finding out the “optimal FMS” from a set of candidate-FMSs. This method of trade-offs among various parameters, viz., design parameters, economic consideratio...

Our field of management science or operations research (I will use the names interchangeably) is roughly 40 years old. Strictly speaking, the beginnings may be found during World War II, but our two flagship journals (Management Science and Operations Research) are approaching their 40th birthdays. Though the fields have generally developed nicely, all has not been smooth sailing. Roughly 20 ye...

Agro-areas of Arroyos Menores (La Colacha) west and south of Rı́o Cuarto (Prov. of Córdoba, Argentina) basins are very fertile but have high soil loses. Extreme rain events, inundations and other severe erosions forming gullies demand urgently actions in this area to avoid soil degradation and erosion supporting good levels of agro production. The authors first improved hydrologic data on La Col...

Multicriteria decision making ~MCDM! methods can be powerful aids for evaluating patients’ medical information in medical diagnostic systems. Technique ordered preference by similarity to the ideal solution ~TOPSIS! is one of the more widely used MCDM methods in decision support systems. For the purpose of this work, the TOPSIS method is modified into a more suitable form and used for the imple...

Selection of qualified persons suitable for different organization functions is a key success factor for an organization. The complexity and importance of the problem call for analytical methods rather than intuitive decisions. The personnel selection problem requires the application of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods for robust recruitment. This paper has to objectives; first to ...

Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) has found many applications in both public and private sector organizations. MCDM is both an approach and a set of techniques, with the goal of providing an overall ordering of options, from the most preferred to the least preferred option. The set of MCDM techniques are implemented in selecting the vendors and 3PL service providers. Supplier selection is a ...

Even as Taiwan’s higher education is growing, graduation from college or university is not a guarantee for employment. Therefore, more and more schools are establishing relationships with enterprises to offer internship opportunities to students. These days senior college students are asked (as a matter of course) whether they are going to choose an internship course or not. What is the key det...

Testability is an essential criterion for software quality and it is always difficult to measure. Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) approaches are very effectively and widely used in predicting the quality of the software. MCDM techniques are very helpful in ambiguous range of decisions. It has the ability to grip the uncertainty of pairwise comparisons. In this paper, multicriteria decision...

There has been a growing interest and activity in the area of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM), especially in the last 25 years. modeling and optimization methods have been developed in both crisp and fuzzy environments. The overwhelming majority of approaches for finding best compromise solutions to MCDM problems do not make use of the interdependences among the objectives. However, as...

Expert Systems (ES), a promising branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), have achieved considerable success in recent years. This area of AI has concentrated on the construction of high-performance programs in specialized professional domains. Building a new expert system is a major investment. Choosing the right expert system building tool or shell is critical to the success and failure of suc...