Solar energy produced through a solar power plant is a freely available non-polluting renewable source of energy that reduces the greenhouse effect. Selecting the best location for a solar power plant among several location alternatives is a complicated multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem since several potentially conflicting quantitative and qualitative criteria needs to be taken into consideration. In this paper of the most commonly used MCDM methods in literature

The aim of this study is to identify the crucial logistics requirements and supply chain management (SCM) strategies for the dairy industry. For product or service development quality function deployment (QFD) is a useful approach to maximize customer satisfaction. The determination of design requirements and supply chain management strategies are important issues during QFD processes for product or service design. For this reason a fuzzy QFD methodology is proposed in this study to determine these ...

During the process of supplier evaluation selecting the best desirable supplier is one of the most critical problems of companies since improperly selected suppliers may cause losing time cost and market share of a company. For this multiple-criteria decision making selection problem in this paper a fuzzy extension of analytic network process (ANP) which uses uncertain human preferences as input information in the decision-making process is applied since conventional methods such as analytic ...

2009 A(H1N1) data for 13 European countries obtained from the weekly influenza surveillance overview (WISO) reports of European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in the form of weekly cumulative fatalities are analyzed. The variability of relative fatalities is explained by the health index of analyzed countries. Vaccination and healthcare practices as reported in the literature are used to explain the departures from this model. The timing of the vaccination with respect to the ...

Researchers often identify robust design as one of the most effective engineering design methods for continuous quality improvement. When more than one quality characteristic is considered an important question is how to trade off robust design solutions. In this paper we consider a bi-objective robust design problem for which Pareto solutions of two quality characteristics need to be obtained. In practical robust design applications a second-order polynomial model is adequate to accommodate the ...

Fixed amounts of available Operating Room (OR) time compatibility of ORs and restrictions related to surgery equipment and surgeon availabilities complicate the process of preparing the master surgical schedule at hospitals. In this research an integer programming model and its application at Etiler World Eye Hospital (in Turkey) are presented in order to create a master surgical schedule that includes the most common surgery types on weekly basis and resolves surgeon equipment and operating room ...

Purpose Since the demand for energy has dramatically increased in the countries which have fast-growing population and economy, they have faced with a critical problem of how to evaluate a set of potential energy sources (i.e. nuclear, natural gas, bio, geothermal, hydro, wind and solar) and choose the ultimate energy source for their needs. On the other hand, this critical problem turns into a multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) in the presence of a set of energy source alternatives and ...

This research proposes a stochastic programming model to determine how supplies should be positioned and distributed among a network of cooperative warehouses. The model incorporates constraints that enforce equity in service while also considering traffic congestion resulting from possible evacuation behavior and time constraints for providing effective response. We make use of short-term information (e.g. hurricane forecasts) to more effectively preposition supplies in preparation for their ...

Earthquake relief network involves storage and distribution of relief aid to people in need. In this paper, a new stochastic multi-objective mixed integer mathematical model is developed and implemented in Kadikoy municipality of Istanbul, Turkey in order to configure part of the earthquake relief network. The aim of the model is to help decision makers decide on the locations of storage areas for shelters pre-earthquake and distribution of shelters from these areas to temporary shelter areas ...

We address the implementation of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to support and manage durable products over their entire lifecycle with a focus on optimising the RFID tagging system. We develop general models that optimise the placement of RFID tags on an end product and its components the allocation of the data on tags and the selection of RFID tags and their configuration. The primary criteria for optimisation are to maximise the value of RFID data and to minimise the total ...