Easy-Interactive Ordering of the Pareto Optimal Set with Imprecise Weights

In the multi objective optimization, in the case when generated set of Pareto optimal solutions is large, occurs the problem to select of the best solution from this set. In this paper, is suggested a method to order of Pareto set. Ordering the Pareto optimal set carried out in conformity with the introduced distance function between each solution and selected reference point, where the reference point may be adjusted to represent the preferences of a decision making agent. Preference information about objective weights from a decision maker may be expressed imprecisely. The developed elicitation procedure provides an opportunity to obtain surrogate numerical weights for the objectives, and thus, to manage impreciseness of preference. The proposed method is a scalable to many objectives and can be used independently or as complementary to the various visualization techniques in the multidimensional case.

A New History Based Method to Handle the Recurring Concept Shifts in Data Streams

Recent developments in storage technology and networking architectures have made it possible for broad areas of applications to rely on data streams for quick response and accurate decision making. Data streams are generated from events of real world so existence of associations, which are among the occurrence of these events in real world, among concepts of data streams is logical. Extraction of these hidden associations can be useful for prediction of subsequent concepts in concept shifting data streams. In this paper we present a new method for learning association among concepts of data stream and prediction of what the next concept will be. Knowing the next concept, an informed update of data model will be possible. The results of conducted experiments show that the proposed method is proper for classification of concept shifting data streams.

Automated Thickness Measurement of Retinal Blood Vessels for Implementation of Clinical Decision Support Systems in Diagnostic Diabetic Retinopathy

The structure of retinal vessels is a prominent feature, that reveals information on the state of disease that are reflected in the form of measurable abnormalities in thickness and colour. Vascular structures of retina, for implementation of clinical diabetic retinopathy decision making system is presented in this paper. Retinal Vascular structure is with thin blood vessel, whose accuracy is highly dependent upon the vessel segmentation. In this paper the blood vessel thickness is automatically detected using preprocessing techniques and vessel segmentation algorithm. First the capture image is binarized to get the blood vessel structure clearly, then it is skeletonised to get the overall structure of all the terminal and branching nodes of the blood vessels. By identifying the terminal node and the branching points automatically, the main and branching blood vessel thickness is estimated. Results are presented and compared with those provided by clinical classification on 50 vessels collected from Bejan Singh Eye hospital..

A DEA Model for Performance Evaluation in The Presence of Time Lag Effect

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a methodology that computes efficiency values for decision making units (DMU) in a given period by comparing the outputs with the inputs. In many cases, there are some time lag between the consumption of inputs and the production of outputs. For a long-term research project, it is hard to avoid the production lead time phenomenon. This time lag effect should be considered in evaluating the performance of organizations. This paper suggests a model to calculate efficiency values for the performance evaluation problem with time lag. In the experimental part, the proposed methods are compared with the CCR and an existing time lag model using the data set of the 21st century frontier R&D program which is a long-term national R&D program of Korea.

Human Verification in a Video Surveillance System Using Statistical Features

A human verification system is presented in this paper. The system consists of several steps: background subtraction, thresholding, line connection, region growing, morphlogy, star skelatonization, feature extraction, feature matching, and decision making. The proposed system combines an advantage of star skeletonization and simple statistic features. A correlation matching and probability voting have been used for verification, followed by a logical operation in a decision making stage. The proposed system uses small number of features and the system reliability is convincing.

A New Decision Making Approach based on Possibilistic Influence Diagrams

This paper proposes a new decision making approch based on quantitative possibilistic influence diagrams which are extension of standard influence diagrams in the possibilistic framework. We will in particular treat the case where several expert opinions relative to value nodes are available. An initial expert assigns confidence degrees to other experts and fixes a similarity threshold that provided possibility distributions should respect. To illustrate our approach an evaluation algorithm for these multi-source possibilistic influence diagrams will also be proposed.

Production and Remanufacturing of Returned Products in Supply Chain using Modified Genetic Algorithm

In recent years, environment regulation forcing manufactures to consider recovery activity of end-of- life products and/or return products for refurbishing, recycling, remanufacturing/repair and disposal in supply chain management. In this paper, a mathematical model is formulated for single product production-inventory system considering remanufacturing/reuse of return products and rate of return products follows a demand like function, dependent on purchasing price and acceptance quality level. It is useful in decision making to determine whether to go for remanufacturing or disposal of returned products along with newly produced products to satisfy a stationary demand. In addition, a modified genetic algorithm approach is proposed, inspired by particle swarm optimization method. Numerical analysis of the case study is carried out to validate the model.

Taking People, Process and Partnership on Board for Participatory Decision Making

Public administration institutions in cooperation with politicians are not the sole policy decision makers in full meaning any longer. Meanwhile, a special role, namely steering the decision making process, could be delegated to them. Despite the wide scientific discussion on different aspects what has direct impact on policy creation, there is a lack of holistic practical managerial advice, which could integrate infrastructure of policy decision making with intellectual capital and with interconnection of partnership. The proposed harmonized decision making model of process, people and partnership entitled by acronym HM-3P is analyzed as a framework for implementation of public administration steering role seeking the coherent social involvement in policy decision making.

Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Selection Model with Application to Chemical Engineering Management Decisions

Chemical industry project management involves complex decision making situations that require discerning abilities and methods to make sound decisions. Project managers are faced with decision environments and problems in projects that are complex. In this work, case study is Research and Development (R&D) project selection. R&D is an ongoing process for forward thinking technology-based chemical industries. R&D project selection is an important task for organizations with R&D project management. It is a multi-criteria problem which includes both tangible and intangible factors. The ability to make sound decisions is very important to success of R&D projects. Multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches are major parts of decision theory and analysis. This paper presents all of MCDM approaches for use in R&D project selection. It is hoped that this work will provide a ready reference on MCDM and this will encourage the application of the MCDM by chemical engineering management.

A Group Based Fuzzy MCDM for Selecting Knowledge Portal System

Despite of many scholars and practitioners recognize the knowledge management implementation in an organizations but insufficient attention has been paid by researchers to select suitable knowledge portal system (KPS) selection. This study develops a Multi Criteria Decision making model based on the fuzzy VIKOR approach to help organizations in selecting KPS. The suitable portal is the critical influential factors on the success of knowledge management (KM) implementation in an organization.

Behavioral Analysis of Team Members in Virtual Organization based on Trust Dimension and Learning

Trust management and Reputation models are becoming integral part of Internet based applications such as CSCW, E-commerce and Grid Computing. Also the trust dimension is a significant social structure and key to social relations within a collaborative community. Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) is a difficult task in the context of distributed environment (information across different geographical locations) and multidisciplinary decisions are involved such as Virtual Organization (VO). To aid team decision making in VO, Decision Support System and social network analysis approaches are integrated. In such situations social learning helps an organization in terms of relationship, team formation, partner selection etc. In this paper we focus on trust learning. Trust learning is an important activity in terms of information exchange, negotiation, collaboration and trust assessment for cooperation among virtual team members. In this paper we have proposed a reinforcement learning which enhances the trust decision making capability of interacting agents during collaboration in problem solving activity. Trust computational model with learning that we present is adapted for best alternate selection of new project in the organization. We verify our model in a multi-agent simulation where the agents in the community learn to identify trustworthy members, inconsistent behavior and conflicting behavior of agents.

Momentum Accounting in Public Management: A Case Study in a Brazilian Navy-s Services Provider Military Organization

This study examines the possibility to apply the theory of multidimensional accounting (momentum accounting) in a Brazilian Navy-s Services Provider Military Organization (Organização Militar Prestadora de Serviços - OMPS). In general, the core of the said theory is the fact that Accounting does not recognize the inertia of transactions occurring in an entity, and that occur repeatedly in some cases, regardless of the implementation of new actions by its managers. The study evaluates the possibility of greater use of information recorded in the financial statements of the unit of analysis, within the strategic decisions of the organization. As a research strategy, we adopted the case study. The results infer that it is possible to use the theory in the context of a multidimensional OMPS, promoting useful information for decision-making and thereby contributing to the strengthening of the necessary alignment of its administration with the current desires of the Brazilian society.

Explorations in the Role of Emotion in Moral Judgment

Recent theorizations on the cognitive process of moral judgment have focused on the role of intuitions and emotions, marking a departure from previous emphasis on conscious, step-by-step reasoning. My study investigated how being in a disgusted mood state affects moral judgment. Participants were induced to enter a disgusted mood state through listening to disgusting sounds and reading disgusting descriptions. Results shows that they, when compared to control who have not been induced to feel disgust, are more likely to endorse actions that are emotionally aversive but maximizes utilitarian return The result is analyzed using the 'emotion-as-information' approach to decision making. The result is consistent with the view that emotions play an important role in determining moral judgment.

Online Signature Verification Using Angular Transformation for e-Commerce Services

The rapid growth of e-Commerce services is significantly observed in the past decade. However, the method to verify the authenticated users still widely depends on numeric approaches. A new search on other verification methods suitable for online e-Commerce is an interesting issue. In this paper, a new online signature-verification method using angular transformation is presented. Delay shifts existing in online signatures are estimated by the estimation method relying on angle representation. In the proposed signature-verification algorithm, all components of input signature are extracted by considering the discontinuous break points on the stream of angular values. Then the estimated delay shift is captured by comparing with the selected reference signature and the error matching can be computed as a main feature used for verifying process. The threshold offsets are calculated by two types of error characteristics of the signature verification problem, False Rejection Rate (FRR) and False Acceptance Rate (FAR). The level of these two error rates depends on the decision threshold chosen whose value is such as to realize the Equal Error Rate (EER; FAR = FRR). The experimental results show that through the simple programming, employed on Internet for demonstrating e-Commerce services, the proposed method can provide 95.39% correct verifications and 7% better than DP matching based signature-verification method. In addition, the signature verification with extracting components provides more reliable results than using a whole decision making.

New Fuzzy Preference Relations and its Application in Group Decision Making

Decision making preferences to certain criteria usually focus on positive degrees without considering the negative degrees. However, in real life situation, evaluation becomes more comprehensive if negative degrees are considered concurrently. Preference is expected to be more effective when considering both positive and negative degrees of preference to evaluate the best selection. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose the conflicting bifuzzy preference relations in group decision making by utilization of a novel score function. The conflicting bifuzzy preference relation is obtained by introducing some modifications on intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. Releasing the intuitionistic condition by taking into account positive and negative degrees simultaneously and utilizing the novel score function are the main modifications to establish the proposed preference model. The proposed model is tested with a numerical example and proved to be simple and practical. The four-step decision model shows the efficiency of obtaining preference in group decision making.

A Hybridized Competency-Based Teacher Candidate Selection System

Teachers form the backbone of any educational system, hence selecting qualified candidates is very crucial. In Malaysia, the decision making in the selection process involves a few stages: Initial filtering through academic achievement, taking entry examination and going through an interview session. The last stage is the most challenging since it highly depends on human judgment. Therefore, this study sought to identify the selection criteria for teacher candidates that form the basis for an efficient multi-criteria teacher-candidate selection model for that last stage. The relevant criteria were determined from the literature and also based on expert input that is those who were involved in interviewing teacher candidates from a public university offering the formal training program. There are three main competency criteria that were identified which are content of knowledge, communication skills and personality. Further, each main criterion was divided into a few subcriteria. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique was employed to allocate weights for the criteria and later, integrated a Simple Weighted Average (SWA) scoring approach to develop the selection model. Subsequently, a web-based Decision Support System was developed to assist in the process of selecting the qualified teacher candidates. The Teacher-Candidate Selection (TeCaS) system is able to assist the panel of interviewers during the selection process which involves a large amount of complex qualitative judgments.

Contextual Factors in the Decision Making of Industrialized Building System Technology

Currently, the Malaysian construction industry is focusing on transforming construction processes from conventional building methods to the Industrialized Building System (IBS). Still, research on the decision making of IBS technology adoption with the influence of contextual factors is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to explore how contextual factors influence the IBS decision making in building projects which is perceived by those involved in construction industry namely construction stakeholders and IBS supply chain members. Theoretical background, theoretical frameworks and literatures which identify possible contextual factors that influence decision making towards IBS technology adoption are presented. This paper also discusses the importance of contextual factors in IBS decision making, highlighting some possible crossover benefits and making some suggestions as to how these can be utilized. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations are made with respect to the perception of socio-economic, IBS policy and IBS technology associated with building projects.

Sensory Evaluation of the Selected Coffee Products Using Fuzzy Approach

Knowing consumers' preferences and perceptions of the sensory evaluation of drink products are very significant to manufacturers and retailers alike. With no appropriate sensory analysis, there is a high risk of market disappointment. This paper aims to rank the selected coffee products and also to determine the best of quality attribute through sensory evaluation using fuzzy decision making model. Three products of coffee drinks were used for sensory evaluation. Data were collected from thirty judges at a hypermarket in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia. The judges were asked to specify their sensory evaluation in linguistic terms of the quality attributes of colour, smell, taste and mouth feel for each product and also the weight of each quality attribute. Five fuzzy linguistic terms represent the quality attributes were introduced prior analysing. The judgment membership function and the weights were compared to rank the products and also to determine the best quality attribute. The product of Indoc was judged as the first in ranking and 'taste' as the best quality attribute. These implicate the importance of sensory evaluation in identifying consumers- preferences and also the competency of fuzzy approach in decision making.

Plant Location Selection by Using a Three-Step Methodology: Delphi-AHP-VIKOR

Nowadays, the plant location selection has a critical impact on the performance of numerous companies. In this paper, a methodology is presented to solve this problem. The three decision making methods, namely Delphi, AHP and improved VIKOR, are hybridized in order to make the best use of information available based on the decision makers or experts. In this respect, the aim of using Delphi is to select the most influential criteria by a few decision makers. The AHP is utilized to give weights of the selected criteria. Finally, the improved VIKOR method is applied to rank alternatives. At the end of paper, an application example demonstrates the applicability of the proposed methodology.

A Bi-Objective Preventive Healthcare Facility Network Design with Incorporating Cost and Time Saving

Main goal of preventive healthcare problems are at decreasing the likelihood and severity of potentially life-threatening illnesses by protection and early detection. The levels of establishment and staffing costs along with summation of the travel and waiting time that clients spent are considered as objectives functions of the proposed nonlinear integer programming model. In this paper, we have proposed a bi-objective mathematical model for designing a network of preventive healthcare facilities so as to minimize aforementioned objectives, simultaneously. Moreover, each facility acts as M/M/1 queuing system. The number of facilities to be established, the location of each facility, and the level of technology for each facility to be chosen are provided as the main determinants of a healthcare facility network. Finally, to demonstrate performance of the proposed model, four multi-objective decision making techniques are presented to solve the model.