Informatica

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is defined as an innovative business strategy for achieving operational excellence through continuous improvement in the manufacturing sector. By embracing LSS principles, manufacturers can create an adaptable and capable system to preserve a competitive positioning, while reducing waste and defects in the business processes. The integration of sustainability with LSS has contributed to the upward attention among scholars and practitioners worldwide by advancing knowledge of how manufacturers can improve their sustainable performance through LSS practices. For any manufacturing firm, the challenge lies in exploring enablers that support successful adoption of sustainable LSS. Consequently, this study aims to develop an intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making framework for identifying and assessing the enablers influencing an integrated sustainable LSS in electric manufacturing companies. The proposed framework integrates the Weight by Envelope and Slope (WENSLO) and Modified Preference Selection Index (MPSI) models taking into account the developed score and distance formulae under the setting of intuitionistic fuzzy sets. Using an integrated intuitionistic fuzzy WENSLO-MPSI model, this study further evaluated thirteen sustainable LSS enablers of five electric manufacturing companies, followed by sensitivity and comparative analyses. The findings indicated that “Linking SLSS to business strategies”, “Green design principles” and “Effective scheduling” are the most significant enablers to implement sustainable LSS in an electrical manufacturing company.

The Autonomous Vehicle (AV) industry is constantly growing, thus analysing its perspectives is essential. However, for this analysis a sophisticated approach is necessary which considers the ambiguity of decision-makers, and different objectives and criteria related to stakeholders. In this paper a new model is proposed based on Decomposed Fuzzy Sets and the Best-Worst Method to deal with possible non-reciprocity of pairwise comparisons and different preferences of stakeholders in the AV industry. The main advantage of the model is that it is capable of considering optimistic and pessimistic attitudes along with the different objectives and criteria of the involved groups. The results show that users require short travel time, while operators, manufacturers and legislators expect mainly the increase of revenues from the AV implementation. Among the most important criteria, our analysis indicates the need of regulatory and safety issues are the most essential obstacles of expanding the AV industry. The new model can also be applied for evaluating the perspectives of other emerging technologies and industrial sectors.

Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) is one of the most reliable and applicable decision-making tools to address real-life complex and multi-dimensional problems in accordance with the concepts of sustainable development and circular economy. Although there have been several literature reviews on several MCDM methods, there is a research gap in conducting a literature review on the Multi-Attributive Border Approximation area Comparison (MABAC) as a useful technique to deal with intelligent decision-making systems. This study attempts to present a comprehensive literature review of 117 articles on recent developments and applications of MABAC. Future outlook is provided considering challenges and current trends.

Consensus creation is a complex challenge in decision making for conflicting or quasi-conflicting evaluator groups. The problem is even more difficult to solve, if one or more respondents are non-expert and provide uncertain or hesitant responses in a survey. This paper presents a methodological approach, the Interval-valued Spherical Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process, with the objective to handle both types of problems simultaneously; considering hesitant scoring and synthesizing different stakeholder group opinions by a mathematical procedure. Interval-valued spherical fuzzy sets are superior to the other extensions with a more flexible characterization of membership function. Interval-valued spherical fuzzy sets are employed for incorporating decision makers’ judgements about the membership functions of a fuzzy set into the model with an interval instead of a single point. In the paper, Interval-valued spherical fuzzy AHP method has been applied to public transportation problem. Public transport development is an appropriate case study to introduce the new model and analyse the results due to the involvement of three classically conflicting stakeholder groups: passengers, non-passenger citizens and the representatives of the local municipality. Data from a real-world survey conducted recently in the Turkish big city, Mersin, help in understanding the new concept. As comparison, all likenesses and differences of the outputs have been pointed out in the reflection with the picture fuzzy AHP computation of the same data. The results are demonstrated and analysed in detail and the step-by-step description of the procedure might foment other applications of the model.

Three main approaches presently dominate preferences derivation or evaluation process in decision analysis (selecting, ranking or sorting options, alternatives, actions or decisions): value type approach (a value function or an utility measure is derived for each alternative to represent its adequacy with decision goal); outranking methods (a pair comparison of alternatives are carried up under each attribute or criteria to derive a pre-order on the alternatives set); and decision rules approach (a set of decision rules are derived by a learning process from a decision table with possible missing data). All these approaches suppose to have a single decision objective to satisfy and all alternatives characterized by a common set of attributes or criteria. In this paper we adopt an approach that highlights bipolar nature of attributes with regards to objectives that we consider to be inherent to any decision analysis problem. We, therefore, introduce supporting and rejecting notions to describ attributes and objectives relationships leading to an evaluation model in terms of two measures or indices (selectability and rejectability) for each alternative in the framework of satisficing game theory. Supporting or rejecting degree of an attribute with regard to an objective is assessed using known techniques such as analytic hierarchy process (AHP). This model allows alternatives to be characterized by heteregeneous attributes and incomparability between alternatives in terms of Pareto-equilibria.