Consider a policymaker who wants to decide which intervention to perform in order to change a currently undesirable situation. The policymaker has at her disposal a team of experts, each with their own understanding of the causal dependencies between different factors contributing to the outcome. The policymaker has varying degrees of confidence in the experts’ opinions. She wants to combine th...

Currently, there is an increasing demand for more e cient and practical environmental impact assessment (EIA) tools due to the emerging climate change challenges and need to better evaluate and control impacts of industrial technologies and activities. However, due to the inherent uncertainties, vagueness's of assessment data, traditional EIA methods are unable to handle e ciently and properly ...

Background Cold hypersensitivity in the hands and feet (CHHF) is a symptom patients usually feel cold in their hands and feet, but not dealt with a disease in western medicine. However, it is often appealed by patients at a clinic of Korean medicine (KM), considered to be a sort of key diagnostic indicator, and actively treated by physicians. Nevertheless, there is no standardized diagnostic de...

In group decision making (GDM) problems fuzzy preference relations (FPR) are widely used for representing decision makers’ opinions on the set of alternatives. In order to avoid misleading solutions, the study of consistency and consensus has become a very important aspect. This article presents a simulated annealing (SA) based soft computing approach to optimize the consistency/consensus level...

The introduction of fuzzy logic into expert systems is an approach that allows expert systems to deal with real-world aspects that cannot be modeled accurately with classical crisp logic. An example is the formation of human opinions that are not always crisp with respect to the membership of a certain element in a set. In addition, the Delphi method is a technique for forming a stable consensu...

In Group Decision Making (GDM) the automatic consensus models are guided by different consensus measures which usually are obtained by aggregating similarities observed among experts’ opinions. Most GDM problems based on linguistic approaches use symmetrically and uniformly distributed linguistic term sets to express experts’ opinions. However, there exist problems whose assessments need to be ...

OBJECTIVE To introduce a fuzzy linguistic model for evaluating the risk of neonatal death. METHODS The study is based on the fuzziness of the variables newborn birth weight and gestational age at delivery. The inference used was Mamdani's method. Neonatologists were interviewed to estimate the risk of neonatal death under certain conditions and to allow comparing their opinions and the model ...

Agriculture is the origin of existence and survival in any society. However, this sector always associated with risk uncertainty, farmers are faced many challenges. Therefore, main aim research was to explore (production) factors irrigated wheat production systems among Kermanshah province, Iran. The exploratory nature study on one hand need for expert judgment other necessitated a Delphi desig...