OBJECTIVE To determine the objectivity, consistency and professional unanimity in the initiation, continuation and withdrawal of life-prolonging procedures in intensive care--to determine methods, time-scale for withdrawal and communication with both staff and relatives--to explore any professional unease about legality, morality or professional defensibility. DESIGN A structured questionnair...

In this work, an extended evaluation approach for decision making units (DMUs) with a single output is proposed. Firstly, the input and output data for each DMU are changed in the same proportion until all the outputs are equal, and then the coordinate system is established with input i as the ith coordinate axis. Secondly, in the coordinate system, the production possibility set, which is span...

In many industrial engineering applications the final decision is based on the evaluation of a number of alternatives in terms of a number of criteria. This problem may become a very difficult one when the criteria are expressed in different units or the pertinent data are difficult to be quantified. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is an effective approach in dealing with this kind of deci...

Human intelligence is understood to be a result of collective decisions over a period of time with an objective to enforce a desired objective or activity. The neural understanding of the intelligence is reflective of a simplified behaviour of neurons and its networks. These neurons represent the building blocks of biological intelligence that is a collection of decision making units arranged i...

A novel technique has been introduced in this research which lends its basis to the Directional Slack-Based Measure for the inverse Data Envelopment Analysis. In practice, the current research endeavors to elucidate the inverse directional slack-based measure model within a new production possibility set. On one occasion, there is a modification imposed on the output (input) quantities of an ef...