Search results for "Fuzzy set theory"

Prioritization of students’ needs for education service design and development by embedding AHP and fuzzy set theory: A case study

2015

Student satisfaction represents a strategic factor for many universities towards increasing competition concerning students recruitment. Thus, nowadays many universities take into account typical customer-oriented industry’s approaches for the education service design and development. In such a condition, prioritization of students’ needs represents a crucial step to appropriately adopt these approaches. This paper proposes an effective way to evaluate importance of students’ needs based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, in which linguistic variables are parameterized by means of triangular fuzzy numbers, to deal with uncertainty, subjectivity and vagueness. Finally, a case st…

FUZZINESS: the emergence of a new scientific concept

2011

Service quality benchmarking via a novel approach based on fuzzy ELECTRE III and IPA: an empirical case involving the Italian public healthcare conte…

2017

A novel fuzzy-based approach which combines ELECTRE III along with the Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is proposed in the present work to comparatively evaluate the service quality in the public healthcare context. Specifically, ELECTRE III is firstly considered to compare the service performance of examined hospitals in a noncompensatory manner. Afterwards, IPA is employed to support the service quality management to point out improvement needs and their priorities. The proposed approach also incorporates features of the Fuzzy Set Theory so as to address the possible uncertainty, subjectivity and vagueness of involved experts in evaluating the service quality. The model is applied to…

Handling stakeholder uncertain judgments in strategic transport service analyses

2013

Abstract The quality level of services has to be constantly controlled, especially under conditions of competition increasing and limited resources. However, considering that service performance analyses are based on stakeholders' judgments, they can be characterized by possible uncertainties related to incompleteness for partial ignorance, imprecision for subjectivity and even vagueness. Therefore, under these conditions, unreliable results can be obtained by widely used service analysis methodologies. In the present paper, a methodology based on a recent extension of the SERVQUAL model, and that uses in combined manner the fuzzy set theory and the analytic hierarchy process method is prop…

DINESERV along with fuzzy hierarchical TOPSIS to support the best practices observation and service quality improvement in the restaurant context

2019

Abstract The present work proposes a new Multi-Criteria-Decision-Analysis (MCDA)-based approach integrating the DINESERV model along with the hierarchical TOPSIS method as measurement tool for evaluating quality in the restaurant services context. More in detail, on the basis of the DINESERV theoretical framework of the restaurant service quality, hierarchical TOPSIS is applied to compare quality of restaurant services. Actually, due to the prioritization process of hierarchical TOPSIS, investigated services providers are consistently and effectively assessed against criteria and sub-criteria of DINESERV, so allowing the identification of both best practices and weaknesses of delivered serv…

Reflections on Technology and Human Sciences: rediscovering a common thread through the analysis of a few epistemological features of fuzziness

2013

A number of reasons, both historical and philosophical, has caused Technology and Human Sciences to be perceived as disjoint domains. In opposi- tion, we claim that there exists a strong methodological affinity between these apparently disconnected fields of knowledge. Our view is further corroborated by new hints from Information Sciences, in which new scientific concepts and tools such as fuzziness have emerged. Comparing the ways in which both Technology and Literature offer a model of reality we shall see that their approaches preserve a strong connection with the “description” of the pieces of reality they aim to model, against the Galileian hard sciences’ approach of making bold hypot…