Title: Assessing candidate industrial technologies utilising hierarchical fuzzy decision making systems

Authors: Ivan Vrana, Shady Aly

Addresses: Department of Information Engineering, Czech University of Life Science in Prague, Kamycka, 129, Prague 6 16521, Czech Republic. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Helwan University, Shrief Street, 1, P.O. 11792, Helwan, Egypt

Abstract: The adoption of new industrial technology is a type of critical decisions. Important characteristics of such significant decision problem are ill-structuredness, subjectivity and vagueness of input and output factors and their relationships. Most of past researches have considered only the quantitative view, and little or even no researches have treated inherent ambiguity in determining exact values of quantitative inputs and in quantifying subjective ones. In this paper, a hierarchical fuzzy decision making model is proposed for handling vagueness and subjectivity associated with the problem|s inputs (i.e. technology performance factors), and for structuring the relationships between them at one side and a technology evaluation score at the other side. The inputs to the model are groups of technical, economical and transferability-related measures. The output of the model is a crisp score for comparing merits of candidate technologies. Finally, a hypothetical illustrative example is provided.

Keywords: fuzzy logic; hierarchical fuzzy systems; technology transfer; hierarchical fuzzy decision making; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; vagueness; subjectivity; technology evaluation; technology adoption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2010.034336

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2010 Vol.6 No.2, pp.187 - 206

Published online: 01 Aug 2010 *

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