Expert Systems (ES), a promising branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), have achieved considerable success in recent years. This area of AI has concentrated on the construction of high-performance programs in specialized professional domains. Building a new expert system is a major investment. Choosing the right expert system building tool or shell is critical to the success and failure of suc...

The Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) utility determining approaches and fuzzy sets are considered to be new development approaches, which have been recently presented, extended, and used by some scholars in area of decision making. There is a lack of research regarding to systematic literature review and classification of study about these approaches. Therefore; in the present study, th...

Decision-making problems require systematic approach to evaluate alternatives using both quantitative and non-quantitative factors. Standard methods to solve problems lack considerations of non-quantitative factors, in which numeric value is difficult to assign. Different techniques like Fuzzy set theory, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) are presently b...

Landslides are one of the most devastating disasters among all natural hazards in Brazil, with nearly 3,355 fatalities between 1988 and 2013. Apart from the loss of lives, they also cause substantial economic losses. As an example, the mass movements that occurred in 2011 in Rio de Janeiro resulted in US$ 2.8 billion in damage. Thus, in order to mitigate these hazards, it is essential to map th...

Concepts of decision design are introduced via Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), Knowledge Management (KM) and optimisation. Decision-making conflict is defined as the absence of a prominent tradeoffsfree alternative. Because tradeoffs are properties of alternatives (the measured) and not of criteria (the measures), designing an optimal decision involves designing a tradeoffs-free alter...

 Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods have evolved to accommodate various types of applications. Dozens of methods have been developed, with even small variations to existing methods causing the creation of new branches of research. This paper performs a literature review of common Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods, examines the advantages and disadvantages of the identified meth...

There is a great need for domain analysis and modelling for decision support systems (DSSs) with an e0ective methodology to assist the development of DSSs. This paper discusses the object-oriented modelling of DSSs for multicriteria decision making (MCDM) in natural resource management. This approach of DSS modelling is integrated into the uniform framework based on object orientation for both ...

Multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) is widely used in ranking one or more alternatives from a set of available alternatives with respect to multiple criteria. Inspired by MCDM which are methods to systematically evaluate alternatives, we propose a new Fuzzy TOPSIS for evaluating outsourcing software companies both using subjective and objective weights. While crisp data are inadequate to m...

Oligodendrocyte (OL) development relies on many extracellular cues, most of which are secreted cytokines from neighboring neural cells. Although it is generally accepted that both astrocytes and microglia are beneficial for OL development, there is a lack of understanding regarding whether astrocytes and microglia play similar or distinct roles. The current study examined the effects of astrocy...

In this paper, one of the multi-criteria models in making decision, a Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), is described. Some of the advantages of TOPSIS methods are: simplicity, rationality, comprehensibility, good computational efficiency and ability to measure the relative performance for each alternative in a simple mathematical form. The paper has a r...