Informatica

The best-worst method (BWM) is a multi-criteria decision-making method which works based on a pairwise comparison system. Using such a systematic pairwise comparison enhances consistency and reliability of results. The BWM results in single solution when there are two or three criteria, and for problems with fully-consistent systems, with any number of criteria. To obtain the weights of criteria for not fully-consistent comparison systems with more than three criteria, there may be a multiple optimal solution. Although multiple optimality may be desirable in some cases, in other cases, decision-makers prefer to have a unique optimal solution. This study proposes new models which result in a unique solution. The proposed models have less constraints in comparison with the previous models.

In the discrete form of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems, we are usually confronted with a decision-matrix formed from the information of some alternatives on some criteria. In this study, a new method is proposed for simultaneous evaluation of criteria and alternatives (SECA) in an MCDM problem. For making this type of evaluation, a multi-objective non-linear programming model is formulated. The model is based on maximization of the overall performance of alternatives with consideration of the variation information of decision-matrix within and between criteria. The standard deviation is used to measure the within-criterion, and the correlation is utilized to consider the between-criterion variation information. By solving the multi-objective model, we can determine the overall performance scores of alternatives and the objective weights of criteria simultaneously. To validate the proposed method, a numerical example is used, and three analyses are made. Firstly, we analyse the objective weights determined by the method, secondly, the stability of the performance scores and ranking results are examined, and finally, the ranking results of the proposed method are compared with those of some existing MCDM methods. The results of the analyses show that the proposed method is efficient to deal with MCDM problems.

Inventory management is an important part of production planning process for enterprises. Decisions for strategies to determine when and how many to buy or make can be made by classifying the inventory items based on their sorts. In this evaluation, ABC inventory classification is one of the most commonly used approaches. In this study, a fuzzy analytic network process approach was proposed to determine the weights of the criteria and the scores of the inventory items were determined with simple additive weighting by using linguistic terms. Applying fuzzy ANP to a multi-criteria inventory classification problem is the novelty of this study in the related literature. In addition, the application area of the problem which is the management of the engineering vehicles' items in a construction firm is different from the other studies.