Search results for "Decision Analysis"

Multicriteria evaluation of carbon-neutral heat-only production technologies for district heating

2018

Climate change mitigation requires reducing dependence on fossil fuels and transition to low carbon energy production technologies. Nearly half of the global final energy consumption is thermal energy produced from technologies with high carbon dioxide emission. As such, it is imperative to employ carbon-neutral heat production to achieve a sustainable energy system. This paper presents a real-life case of applying multicriteria decision analysis for evaluating carbon-neutral heat-only production technologies in a major district heating system in Finland. A group of 10 experts from the energy company contributed in defining the alternative technologies and multiple economic, technological, …

2014

This paper presents a mathematical model for robust production planning. The model helps fashion apparel suppliers in making decisions concerning allocation of production orders to different production plants characterized by different lead times and production costs, and in proper time scheduling and sequencing of these production orders. The model aims at optimizing these decisions concerning objectives of minimal production costs and minimal tardiness. It considers several factors such as the stochastic nature of customer demand, differences in production and transport costs and transport times between production plants in different regions. Finally, the model is applied to a case study.…

Multicriteria evaluation of sustainable energy solutions for Colosseum

2017

Abstract Colosseum is a large office building in the capital region of Finland. The building owner operates on the highly competitive office rental market. With increasing emphasis on environmental responsibility, energy efficiency and sustainable energy solutions can provide competitive edge on the rental market. This study evaluates in terms of multiple criteria different alternatives to enhance the energy solutions of the building. The alternatives included different configurations of solar power, ground source heat, and roof constructions, along with district heating. Decision criteria included internal rate of return, energy efficiency, CO2 emissions, and attractiveness. Attractiveness…

Software Modernization Decision Criteria: An Empirical Study

2005

Decisions regarding software evolution strategies such as modernizations are economically important. We present results of our empirical study of the views of decision makers. We have asked their views of the relative importance of 49 software modernization decision criteria. We have gathered data from Finnish software industry. There were 26 experts from 8 organizations involved. They were mainly upper or middle level managers. Our study shows that there is a large set of criteria which should be taken into account, and that those studied by us provide a good coverage of the relevant ones. We list the top-20 criteria. We also performed a cluster analysis which produced two groups of subjec…

ORDINAL MEASUREMENTS WITH INTERVAL CONSTRAINTS IN THE EIA PROCESS FOR SITING A WASTE STORAGE AREA

2009

We describe application of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure for siting a waste storage area. The world’s largest biofuel-based combined heat and power (CHP) plant was built in Pietarsaari, Finland. The plant produces certain byproducts, such as flue dust and bottom ash, which need to be processed and stored to prevent releases to the environment. Different storage sites will have different impacts on people, nature, and the economy. Cardinal measurement of the different impacts was considered too costly. Instead, ordinal measurement of all criteria was applied; i.e., experts ranked the alternative storage sites according to each c…

Erodibility prioritization of sub-watersheds using morphometric parameters analysis and its mapping: A comparison among TOPSIS, VIKOR, SAW, and CF mu…

2018

Soil erosion, every year imposes extensive damages to human beings by means of reducing soil productivity and filling reservoirs from sedimentation in Ghaemshahr Basin in Mazandaran Province, (Iran); therefore, identifying prone areas to soil erosion for preventive measures is essential in this basin. In this research, erodibility prioritization of sub-watersheds of Ghaemshahr Basin has done using morphometric parameters analysis and different multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) models such as simple additive weighing (SAW), VlseKriterijumska optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR), technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), and compound factor (CF). For t…

Polish is quantitatively different on quartzite flakes used on different worked materials.

2020

Metrology has been successfully used in the last decade to quantify use-wear on stone tools. Such techniques have been mostly applied to fine-grained rocks (chert), while studies on coarse-grained raw materials have been relatively infrequent. In this study, confocal microscopy was employed to investigate polished surfaces on a coarse-grained lithology, quartzite. Wear originating from contact with five different worked materials were classified in a data-driven approach using machine learning. Two different classifiers, a decision tree and a support-vector machine, were used to assign the different textures to a worked material based on a selected number of parameters (Mean density of furr…

Gully erosion susceptibility mapping using GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis techniques

2019

Abstract This research introduces a scientific methodology for gully erosion susceptibility mapping (GESM) that employs geography information system (GIS)-based multi-criteria decision analysis. The model was tested in Semnan Province, Iran, which has an arid and semi-arid climate with high susceptibility to gully erosion. The technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) models were integrated. The important aspect of this research is that it did not require gully erosion inventory maps for GESM. Therefore, the proposed methodology could be useful in areas with missing or incomplete …

Measuring Sustainability with Unweighted TOPSIS: An Application to Sustainable Tourism in Spain

2021

The measurement of sustainability is complex due to its multiple dimensions of different relative importance and different natures. From the perspective of sustainability, three types of tourism can be established: traditional tourism, sustainable tourism, and sustainable impact tourism. In the context of multiple-criteria decision analysis, this paper presents a flexible method for assess and rank decision alternatives based on their sustainability. The proposal does not require the relative importance of each criterion to be precisely assigned beforehand, which reduces the subjectivity of the decision making and yields results that can be of interest for decision makers. To show the diffe…

An AHP-based evaluation procedure for Innovative Educational Projects: A face-to-face vs. computer-mediated case study

2008

In this paper a procedure to evaluate proposals for Educational Innovation Projects is proposed. This methodology should help the Institute of Educational Sciences of the Politechnical University of Valencia to choose the best Educational Project, the final aim being to provide the Administration with a stringent evaluation methodology, since the current evaluation methodology was found to be neither sufficiently objective nor systematic. Since in the definition and evaluation of these Educational Projects diverse stakeholders are involved, the process has been approached as a MCDA carried out by a group of experts. Although a whole methodology is proposed, the paper has been focused on the…