Efficient selection of bids and product offerings is a key requirement in today’s procurement processes. Purchasing managers have to make comprehensible selections among hundreds of alternatives considering several dozens of criteria. Selection problems like this are challenging, because they require the balancing of multiple, often conflicting objectives. Traditional approaches to multi-attrib...

Value benefit analysis (VBA) is a psychometric instrument for finding the best compromise in forestry multiple-use planning, when the multiple objectives cannot be expressed in the same physical or monetary unit. It insures a systematic assessment of the consequences of proposed alternatives and thoroughly documents the decision process. The method leads to a ranking of alternatives based upon ...

In this paper we propose a decision-making procedure where the agents judge the alternatives through linguistic terms such as ‘very good’, ‘good’, ‘acceptable’, etc. If the agents are not confident about their opinions, they can use a linguistic expression formed by several consecutive linguistic terms. To obtain a ranking on the set of alternatives, the method consists of three different stage...

The conveyor system plays a vital role in improving the performance of flexible manufacturing cells (FMCs). The conveyor selection problem involves the evaluation of a set of potential alternatives based on qualitative and quantitative criteria. This paper presents an integrated multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) model of a fuzzy AHP (analytic hierarchy process) and fuzzy ARAS (additive rati...

One of the big challenges in decision analysis is the assessment of a decision maker’s utility function. To the extent that the alternatives under consideration in a decision-making problem can be partially ordered based on less-than-full information about the utility function, the problem can be simplified somewhat by eliminating dominated alternatives. At the same time, partial orders can hel...

During software development, many decisions need to be made to guarantee satisfaction of the stakeholders’ requirements and goals. The full satisfaction of all of these requirements and goals may not be possible, requiring decisions over conflicting human interests as well as technological alternatives, with an impact on the quality and cost of the final solution. This work aims at assessing th...

In this paper, we describe how to construct physical computer network topologies which can support the establishment of overlays that reduce or increase the distances between nodes. Reducing pairwise distances (i.e., compression) implies that the overlay enjoys significantly lower inter-node latencies compared to the ambient physical network; such an overlay can be used to implement a “high-per...

Animal research is a vital component of US research and well-functioning animal research facilities are critical both to the research itself and to the housing and feeding of the animals. The Office of Animal Care (OAC) at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute realized it had to improve the efficiency and safety of its animal research facility (ARF) to prepare for expansion and to adva...

In recent years, technologically advanced high-throughput techniques have been developed that replace, reduce or refine animal use in vaccine quality control tests. Following validation, these tests are slowly being accepted for use by international regulatory authorities. Because regulatory acceptance itself has not guaranteed that approved humane methods are adopted by manufacturers, various ...

‎selecting the most suitable robot among their wide range of specifications and capabilities is an important issue to perform the hazardous and repetitive jobs‎. ‎companies should take into consideration powerful group decision-making (gdm) methods to evaluate the candidates or potential robots versus the selected attributes (criteria)‎. ‎in this study‎, ‎a new gdm method is proposed by utilizi...