Industrial Engineering & Management

The Choquet integral is a popular tool for dealing with multiple criteria decision making. In practice, if we have a fuzzy measure on the set of criteria, we can use Choquet integral to rank alternatives. In this paper, we consider the inverse problem of Choquet integral: Given a ranking of alternatives, does there exist a fuzzy measure by which we can get the ranking through Choquet integral.

Appropriate financial decisions are important for success of any company. Sometimes, erroneous selection of project or investment ruins the overall company’s financial condition. There are number of financial or engineering economic tools available but the appropriateness of a given project, estimate its value, and justify it from an engineering economics standpoint is the key. It’s known that engineering economics provides the tools and techniques in evaluating alternatives economically and source of many engineering decisions are based on engineering economics. In this paper, we will make economics decision for the location of copper mining plant using traditional engineering economics tools like cash flow, depreciation, and spider diagram and sensitivity analysis by using a real case study.

Healthcare infrastructure is essential for effective operations of healthcare systems. An efficient facility location can save cost and improve the facility utilization. It is important to update the knowledge of methods and applications to locate healthcare facilities for different purposes. This paper provides an overview of methods and challenges for decision-making of the healthcare facility location to ensure an optimal solution. This research suggests answers for defined questions. Challenges are discussed in detail for modeling and applications of healthcare facility location problems. It is noticed that many existing location models were developed to cover the need of special cases. Cost and efficiency are two important criteria for healthcare services to minimize total traveling distance between patients and the healthcare facility. Uncertainty is recognized as an inevitable part of healthcare location problems. Reliability studies and sustainability should be considered in the location modeling. It is necessary to extend dynamic models to meet the trend of parameter changes over the time for decision-making. Considering the level of complexity and trend of needs for the healthcare facility, more research is required on the operation efficiency, patient safety and cost-effective solutions for the better resource utilization in the human-centered healthcare environment. The contribution of this paper is an overview of challenges and methods in the area to provide guidance for performance measures and improvements of healthcare facility location problems. This paper can be used as a guide of methods for the location or relocation of healthcare facilities.

The development of power system from centralized to decentralized control provides a great opportunities for multi agent control. This paper presents a coordination algorithm for power systems based on concept of agents and multi agent systems. Agents provides the ability to execute better controllability on large scale systems including power systems. Here, multi agent systems is defined to regulate voltage of the power system. Tertiary and secondary voltage control that applying controllers to regulate the voltage in the power system are designed by agents. Voltage can be regulated using agents to support security of the power system and avoid fluctuation.

The shortest path problem plays a paramount role in a wide spectrum of domains including transportation, communication and networking. The "primum movens" of this paper is to propose a novel approach for solving the shortest path problem with fuzzy parameters. Two key issues need to be addressed in a way to handle the fuzzy path problem. One is how to determine the sum of two edges. The other is how to compare the lengths of two different paths given that the length of each edge is represented by fuzzy numbers.

To solve these problems we resort to the notions of "nearest interval approximation" and average of a fuzzy number.An assessment of our approach, in comparison with extant ones is also provided. A Numerical example is given for the sake of illustration.