A fuzzy ANP approach to evaluate computer simulation packages

The government's limited budget in managing the condition of the road pavement causes the government to compile a priority ranking of the roads to be handled. Each decision maker has a different assessment for each factor or criterion that is considered in determining the path. This problem requires the same perception from decision makers in choosing road handling priorities. Priority by determining more than one criteria can be done using Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) analysis such as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP). This study seeks to obtain priority handling of the Jalan Bts. Tapteng/Tapsel – Batang Toru – Bts. Sidempuan City using AHP and ANP methods. The criteria used are traffic volume, level of road damage, government policies, handling costs, and area development. The segmentation of the road segment is applied in this study into 9 sub-sections to obtain a uniform alternative length of the road. The results show that the most influential criteria in road handling using the AHP method are traffic volume (0.428), followed by policy (0.192), cost (0.187), road conditions (0.141), and area development (0.052). While in the ANP method, the criteria with the largest weight are traffic volume (0.301), followed by policies (0.196), costs (0.194), road conditions (0.174), and area development (0.134). The results of the two methods also determine the priority of different road handling roads. The results of the ANP method are expected to be a more objective priority due to the consideration of feedback on the elements and clusters themselves.

The ongoing water deficiencies in arid and semi-arid regions in conjunction with certain nutritional requirements highlight the importance of pinpointing the most optimal locations for cultivating agricultural products with the highest yield. Given the importance of this issue, this study proceeds to prepare soil fertility maps for corn production (Zea Mays L.) in Fars province, Iran. Initially, fuzzy membership functions (FMs) are employed to prepare fuzzy maps for each layer in the geographic information system (GIS), after which feature selection algorithms are deployed to designate the most relevant layers. The layers are then assigned specific weights obtained using a combination of analytic network process (ANP) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methods to prepare soil fertility maps. The input data consist of organic content (OC), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn), and copper (Cu). Inverse distance weighting (IDW) is utilized to procure interpolation maps for each layer. Thereafter, zoning maps are obtained using FMs. Ultimately, ANP and AHP models are once again deployed to generate the final overlayered fertility maps for corn production. The results show that combining the ANP method with feature selection (OC, K, Fe, and P) results in higher accuracy than solely applying the AHP method. Thus, incorporating feature selection and ANP methods with both inter and intra-group pair-wise comparison would result in more accurate fertility maps for corn production with lower costs and time complexity.

Previous researches outlined the advantages of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP) methods in solving Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) problems. The advancement of the above methods was continually developed as an effort to cover up various weaknesses. Mainly related to the consistency and linguistic variables in translating the expert opinions. Thus, it initialized the emergence of Fuzzy AHP (F-AHP) and Fuzzy ANP (F-ANP). Due to the restricted operation of these algorithms in smartphone selection, this research attempted to investigate the effectiveness of both methods in providing the analysis of criteria weight, the final recommendation weight, the product recommendation weight, and the execution time in DSS-SmartPhoneRec application development. A survey of one hundred respondents of University students identified the dominant criteria in selecting the smartphone, namely price, Random Access Memory (RAM), processor, internal memory, and camera. Hence, five alternative products were then chosen as the appropriate smartphones’ recommendations based on the respondent’s preferences. As an automatic tool, a DSS-SmartPhoneRec application was built to analyze and compare between F-AHP and F-ANP methods in resolving the smartphone selection cases. It revealed that the level of consistency of criteria weight, the final weight of recommendation, and the weight that the product-based F-ANP was 40% greater than F-AHP. In terms of execution time, F-AHP had a shorter time than F-ANP. Meanwhile, the comparison of products recommendation from DSS-SmartPhoneRec and a manual test showed that F-ANP was 16% more in line with the respondents’ predilection. In a nutshell, the DSS-SmartPhoneRec administered the devote smartphone recommendations based on the user’s expectation. The comparison analysis furnished a learning outcome for the users in determining the appropriate MADM method tailored to the type of cases.

Shopping center plays an important role in distribution system and marketing. These canters provide an appropriate atmosphere for customers; so that, the customers achieve the best service within a short time. However, there is an intense competition among shopping centers to attract more customers for increasing the profit. Therefore, a powerful model assists authorities in identifying the critical competitive aspects and directing their efforts toward performance improvement. However, a number of strategies have been developed to identify the most relevant components. The Delphi technique under intuitionistic fuzzy environment, called intuitionistic fuzzy Delphi method (IFDM) study, is a group-based technique that can simply formulate the uncertainty imposed by decision making circle. On the other hand, multi criteria decision making (MCDM) method such as analytical network process (ANP) is a mathematical tool for taking into account mutual relationships in order to rank a number of criteria. Nonetheless, the ANP is unable to account for the uncertainty involved in the decision-making process. Similarly, the intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) can express ambiguity and vagueness by utilizing the given scale. Because the IFS is robust in dealing with complexity and ambiguity, the IFS-GANP (an integrated model of the IFS and ANP methods under group decision) can result in a more specific description of the situation. As a result, the IFS-GANP approach outperforms both conventional ANP and fuzzy ANP. To demonstrate the model’s feasibility, a case study rating the essential aspects impacting the attractiveness of retail centers is shown. The result demonstrates factor C31 (Location) with value of 0.202 plays the greatest role in attracting customers.

The Presidential Election is one of the key elements in democracy which is regulated by the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia (UUD 1945). General elections (elections) in Indonesia are held every five years, and the people have the right to vote to elect a presidential candidate who they consider worthy of leading the country during the next term of office. The Presidential election process involves various stages, including nomination by political parties or individuals, political campaigns, debates between candidates, and the voting or election stage. The presidential election (presidential election) is held simultaneously with the legislative election. It is important to note that elections are the foundation for democratic governance, ensuring the active participation of the people in determining the direction and leadership of the country. The Presidential Election in Indonesia is a manifestation of the implementation of democratic principles in the country's political system. The AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method and the ANP (Analytic Network Process) method are methods that can be used in making decisions. A method developed by mathematician Thomas L. Saaty to help solve very complex problems by breaking down various decisions into several smaller criteria. The AHP and ANP methods can overcome assessments based on subjective viewpoints and personal preferences, and transform them into weights with consistent and rational values. Super Decisions is a tool developed specifically to support AHP and ANP calculation applications. Super Decisions provides useful tools in analyzing and processing comparison tables, performing consistency calculations, and assisting in AHP and ANP based decision making.

Municipalities are in charge of running and managing public transport activities. This study aims to identify the factors affecting seaway passenger transportation via scheduled high-speed sea buses, motorboats, and cityline from 11 points in Kocaeli Bay. To provide sea transportation service in Kocaeli at a sustainable cost, which is the legal obligation of Metropolitan Municipalities, framing the current transportation system as a whole in the light of these factors is another objective. In today’s rapidly changing world, the criteria may quickly change over time. Many primary and secondary criteria affect public transportation systems. Therefore, it would be appropriate to use multi-criteria decision-making methods while dealing with Public Transport systems. In addition to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, it would be appropriate to use the Analytic Network Process (ANP) method, which is a structure that examines the interaction between criteria and allows systematic revealing of all types of dependencies and feedback between factors and sub-factors affecting the decision-making process. In the study, the results obtained by AHP and ANP methods were compared and evaluated, in order to determine the optimal alternative for the seaway passenger transportation in Kocaeli Bay to be economical, sustainable and continuous.

The rapid development of technology to meet the growing demands of projects, particularly in public administration organizations like e-government, faces various resource constraints. Selecting among dozens or even hundreds of alternative projects and portfolios, while aligning with organizational priorities, presents a complex multi-criteria decision-making challenge. This study explores the use of previous research and IS/IT portfolio management techniques to examine project prioritization practices and methods within successful city-level applications. The study further develops a prioritization model by comparing the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP) methods. The priority levels of nodes (elements) and clusters obtained from the AHP and ANP analyses show relatively insignificant differences; however, the normalized values (eigenvectors) derived from the ANP approach more realistically reflect existing realities. The ANP model offers the advantage of building connections between elements and clusters, enabling feedback analysis, and is considered more effective in bridging the gap between the model and real-world decision-making.

Sustainable risk management is becoming widely accepted, making the incorporation of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues into strategic planning areas crucial to a responsible business philosophy. This article aims to rank organizational sub-risks with a focus on sustainability, offering a methodology based on the analytical network process (ANP) method to improve decision-making and reduce misrepresentation in qualitative evaluation criteria. An integrated approach is presented, starting with the characterization of five risk typologies based on global reports and then prioritizing risks and sub-risks using the ANP method. The sustainability sub-risks with the highest level of prioritization for each risk typology are (1) massive data fraud or theft incident (technological risk), (2) deficit in economic growth (economic risk), (3) water depletion (environmental risk), (4) lack of ethics in the conduct of business (geopolitical risk), and (5) chemical safety (social risk). Finally, a cosine similarity analysis is developed to compare the results obtained with the results of a risk prioritization performed with the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method. The differences between the methods generate a similar risk prioritization; the high similarity indicates the consistency of the relationships and the prioritization of the criteria showing convergence. It is essential to mention that the results should be interpreted cautiously, considering the specific context in which this methodology is developed, and we recommend a periodic verification of risks and sub-risks.

In this study, we utilize analytic network process (ANP), a more general form of AHP, for justifying stand-alone machine tools out of available alternatives in market due to the fact that AHP cannot accommodate the variety of interactions, dependencies and feedback between higher and lower level elements. However, due to the vagueness and uncertainty on judgments of a decision-maker, the crisp pair wise comparison in the conventional ANP seems to be insufficient and imprecise to capture the right judgments of the decision-maker. That is why, also in this paper, fuzzy number logic is introduced in the pair wise comparison of ANP to make up for this deficiency in the ANP. In short, here, an intelligent approach to machine tool selection (MTS) problem through fuzzy ANP is proposed to improve the imprecise ranking of company's requirements which is based on the conventional ANP. In order to reach to final solution, a preference ratio (PR) analysis is done by using the results of the fuzzy ANP, and investment costs of alternatives. In addition, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the proposed approach.

Decision problems related to the wind energy require considering many, often interrelated and dependent on each other, criteria. To solve such problems, decision systems based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods are usually used. Unfortunately, most methods assume independence between the criteria, therefore, their application in decision problems related to the wind energy is debatable. This paper presents the use of the Analytic Network Process (ANP) method to solve a decision problem consisting in selecting the location and design of a wind farm. The use of the ANP method allows capturing the complexity of the decision problem by taking into consideration dependencies between criteria. As part of the verification of the solution, the results of the ANP method were compared with those of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, which uses only hierarchical dependencies between criteria. The conducted verification showed that the inter-criteria dependencies may have a significant influence on the obtained solution. On the basis of the conducted sensitivity analysis and the research into robustness of the rankings to the rank reversal phenomenon, it has been found out that the ranking obtained with the use of the ANP is characterized by a higher quality than by means of the AHP.

Performance evaluation is an important part of the enterprises' strategic management. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can provide an analytical means to determine the importance of the identified factors. The AHP method assumes that the factors presented in the hierarchical structure are independent; however, this assumes that may be inappropriate in light of certain internal and external environment effects. Therefore, it is necessary to employ of analytic network Process (ANP) method. The traditional financial method cannot fully reflect the performance of enterprises, as a result of which the balanced scorecard (BSC) method was developed. However, BSC also some disadvantages. By giving power weights on indicators, ANP method can make up those disadvantages. The objective of this study is to construct an approach based on the ANP and balanced BSC for creating a method of enterprises' performance evaluation.

Network screening and countermeasure selection are two crucial steps in the highway improvement process. In network screening, potential improvement locations are ranked and prioritized based on a specific method with a set of criteria. The most common practice by transportation agencies has been to use a simple scoring method, which, in general, weighs and scores each criterion and then ranks the locations based on their relative overall scoring. The method does not deal well with criteria that are qualitative in nature, nor does it account for the impacts of correlation among the criteria. The introduction of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) provides agencies with a method to include both quantitative and qualitative criteria. However, it does not address the issue on correlation. This dissertation explores the use of both Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Fuzzy Analytic Network Process (FANP) for their potential capabilities to address both issues. Using urban four-lane divided highways in Florida for bicycle safety improvements, both ANP and FANP were shown to provide more reasonable rankings than AHP, with FANP providing the best results among the methods. After the locations are ranked and prioritized for improvements, the next step is to evaluate the potential countermeasures for improvements at the selected top-ranked locations. In this step, the standard practice has been to use Crash Modification Factors (CMFs) to quantify the potential impacts from implementing specific countermeasures. In this research, CMFs for bicycle crashes on urban facilities in Florida were developed using the Generalized Linear Model approach with a Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) distribution. The CMFs were tested for their spatial and temporal transferability and the results show only limited transferability both spatially and temporally. The CMFs show that, in general, wider lanes, lower speed limits, and presence of vegetation in the median reduce bicycle crashes, while presence of sidewalk and sidewalk barrier increase bicycle crashes. The research further considered bicycle exposure using the bicycle activity data from the Strava smartphone application. It was found that increased bicycle activity reduces bicycle crash probabilities on segments but increases bicycle crash probabilities at signalized intersections. Also, presence of bus stops and use of permissive signal phasing at intersections were found to increase bicycle crash probabilities.

Evaluating the system intelligence of the intelligent building systems: Part 2: Construction and validation of analytical models

Landfill site selection using multi criteria decision making: Influential factors for comparing locations

Currently, the analytic network process (ANP) method is widely employed to consider the multiple criteria analysis problems with dependence and feedback effects. However, in order to extend the ANP to resolve the problem of uncertainty or human subjective judgment, the concepts of fuzzy numbers should be incorporated into the ANP to represent the subjective uncertain pairwise judgments. In this paper, therefore, we propose a novel fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) model by solving a mathematical programming problem. Unlike other FANPs, the proposed method does not require the reciprocity assumption of the weight ratios between criteria, and it can derive local and global weights simultaneously in a single model. Two numerical examples of international investment problems are used to demonstrate the proposed method.