Narrow Results

Production in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) makes a substantial contribution to the Gross Domestic Product directly and indirectly in developing economies including India. In the present time, applying Industry 4.0 to the SMEs will build a smart manufacturing system that will prove to be economically feasible as well as socially sustainable. The purpose of this study is to identify and prioritize major barriers of implementing Industry 4.0 in Indian SMEs. A questionnaire with 12 barriers which were identified based on the literature survey and expert discussion was made to be filled by industry experts of production, information technology, business and members of the top management in SMEs. Further, Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods like TOPSIS, VIKOR and PROMETHEE are used to find the rank for each barrier. The study reveals that the major implementation barriers of Industry4.0 in Indian SMEs are fear of unemployment, lack of IT training, poor IT infrastructure, etc. The ranking for each barrier will not only help to assess risks in manufacturing, supply chain or business initiative, but also to help the managers in devising risk mitigation plans. This study may be used by firms working under the manufacturing sector.

Classification algorithm selection is an important issue in many disciplines. Since it normally involves more than one criterion, the task of algorithm selection can be modeled as multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problems. Different MCDM methods evaluate classifiers from different aspects and thus they may produce divergent rankings of classifiers. The goal of this paper is to propose an approach to resolve disagreements among MCDM methods based on Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. Five MCDM methods are examined using 17 classification algorithms and 10 performance criteria over 11 public-domain binary classification datasets in the experimental study. The rankings of classifiers are quite different at first. After applying the proposed approach, the differences among MCDM rankings are largely reduced. The experimental results prove that the proposed approach can resolve conflicting MCDM rankings and reach an agreement among different MCDM methods.

Due to the increasing number of Web Services with the same functionality, selecting a Web Service that best serves the needs of the Web Client has become a tremendously challenging task. Present approaches use non-functional parameters of the Web Services but they do not consider any preprocessing of the set of functionally Similar Web Services. The lack of preprocessing results in increased use of computational resources due to unnecessary processing of Web Services that have a very low to no chance of satisfying the consumer’s requirements. In this paper, we propose an Ensemble classification method for preprocessing and a Web Service Selection method based on the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Once the most eligible Web Services are enumerated through classification, they are ranked using the Technique of Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) used for weight calculation. A prototype of the method is developed, and experiments are conducted on a real-world Web Services dataset. Results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.

In recent years several previous scholars made attempts to develop, extend, propose and apply Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for solving problems in decision making issues. Indeed, there are questions, how TOPSIS can help for solving these problems? Or does TOPSIS solved decision making problems in the real world? Therefore, this study shows the recent developments of TOPSIS approach which are presented by previous scholars. To achieve this objective, there are 105 reviewed papers which developed, extended, proposed and presented TOPSIS approach for solving DM problems. The results of the study indicated that 49 scholars have extended or developed TOPSIS technique and 56 scholars have proposed or presented new modifications for problems solution related to TOPSIS technique from 2000 to 2015. In addition, results of this study indicated that, previous studies have modifications related to this technique in 2011 more than other years.

ABC analysis is a commonly used inventory classification technique which consists in splitting a large number of inventory items into three categories, A, B and C: category A consists in the most important items, category B consists in the moderately important items and category C consists in the least important ones. Through this classification, inventory items are managed in an efficient way. In this paper, we argue the benefits of cross-fertilization of both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and MultiCriteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques to carry out the ABC classification of inventory items. For this purpose, we develop some new hybrid inventory classification models based on metaheuristics (AI techniques) to generate the criteria weights and on Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method (MCDM technique) to compute the overall weighted score of each item on which the ABC classification is performed. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed classification models with respect to some classification models from the literature, a comparative study — based on a service-cost analysis and three real datasets — is conducted. The computational analysis demonstrates that our proposed hybrid models are competitive and produce satisfactory results. The results have also shown, that our proposed models outperform some existing models from the literature.

Ranking the strengths and weaknesses of software engineering students in software development life cycle (SDLC) process level is a challenging task owing to (1) data variation, (2) multievaluation criteria, (3) criterion importance and (4) alternative member importance. According to the existing literature, no specified procedure can rank the ability of software engineering students based on SDLC process levels to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each student. This study aims to present a novel triplex procedure for ranking the ability of software engineering students to address the literature gap. The methodology of the proposed work is presented on the basis of three phases. In the identification phase, four steps are implemented, namely, processing dataset, identifying the criteria, distributing the courses to the software engineering body of knowledge and proposing the pre-decision matrix (DM). The data comprise the GPA and soft skills from 60 software engineering students who graduated from Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris in 2016. In the pre-processing phase, three steps are involved as follows. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is first used to assign weights to the courses and then multiply the assigned weight by courses, which is the first procedure in the proposed work. In this phase, the construction of DM is presented based on multimeasurement criteria (GPA and soft skills), with SDLC process levels as alternatives. In the development phase, AHP is used again to weight the multimeasurement criteria, and this is the second procedure. In such case, the coordinator and head of the software engineering department are consulted to obtain subjective judgments for each criterion. Technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is then used to rank the students, which is the third procedure. In the validation, statistical analysis is performed to validate the results by checking the accuracy of the systematic ranking. Results show that (1) integrating AHP and group TOPSIS is suitable for ranking the ability of students. (2) The 60 students are categorized into five ranking groups based on their strength level: 14 collector requirements, 13 designers, 5 programmers, 13 testers and 15 maintenances. (3) Significant differences are observed between the groups’ scores for each level of SDLC, indicating that the ranking results are identical for all levels.

Important nodes can determine the internal structure of complex networks and reveal the internal relationships of real-world systems, and identifying key nodes in complex networks is one of the important research areas of complex network science. As the king of commodities, changes in the price of gold significantly impact the economic development of various countries. Especially in the early stages of the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine, the price of gold futures has been greatly impacted, and the systemic risks are gradually spreading. In this paper, a gold future price series is mapped into a visibility graph (VG), the characteristics of the gold price time series and key points-in-time, have been explored from the perspective of complex network. First, according to the data structure characteristics of gold futures, this paper converts the closing prices of gold futures of the New York Mercantile Exchange into a complex network through the VG model. Then, by using the complex network model to further delve into the price of gold futures, it is found that the degree distribution of the gold futures network follows a power-law distribution, and has obvious scale-free characteristics. Finally, this paper uses the visual network node shrinking algorithm and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) analysis method to identify the key nodes of the gold futures visual map to find the key time nodes in the timeline of gold futures market. Analysis of the key time nodes of this market by four methods reveals that the repetition rate of the key time nodes in the methods’ top 10 ranking is as high as 82.5%, indicating that the results obtained in this paper are robust. This study introduces a new model to describe the characteristics of gold futures price series, one which can find key time nodes in gold futures prices and provide potential help for predicting gold futures prices.

For decades, centrality has been one of the most studied concepts in the case of complex networks. It addresses the problem of identification of the most influential nodes in the network. Despite the large number of the proposed methods for measuring centrality, each method takes different characteristics of the networks into account while identifying the “vital” nodes, and for the same reason, each has its advantages and drawbacks. To resolve this problem, the TOPSIS method combined with relative entropy can be used. Several of the already existing centrality measures have been developed to be effective in the case of static networks, however, there is an ever-increasing interest to determine crucial nodes in dynamic networks. In this paper, we are investigating the performance of a new method that identifies influential nodes based on relative entropy, in the case of dynamic networks. To classify the effectiveness, the Suspected-Infected model is used as an information diffusion process. We are investigating the average infection capacity of ranked nodes, the Time-Constrained Coverage as well as the Cover Time.

Software Quality has many parameters that govern its value. Of them, usually, Reliability has gained much attention of researchers and practitioners. However, today’s ever-demanding environment poses severe challenges in front of software creators as to continue treating Reliability as one of the most important attributes for governing software quality when other important parameters like re-usability, security and resilience to name a few are also available. Evaluating, ranking and selecting the most approximate attribute to govern the software quality is a complex concern, which technically requires a multi-criteria decision-making environment. Through this paper, we have proposed an Intuitionistic Fuzzy Set-based TOPSIS approach to showcase why reliability is one of the most preferable parameters for governing software quality. In order to collate individual opinions of decision makers; software developers of various firms were administered for rating the importance of various criteria and alternatives.

Performance of a software is an important feature to determine the quality of the software developed. Performance testing of modular software is a time consuming and costly task. Several performance testing tools (PTTs) are available in the market which help software developers to test their software performance. In this paper, we propose an integrated multiobjective optimization model for evaluation and selection of best-fit PTT for modular software system. The total performance tool cost is minimized and the fitness evaluation score of the PTTs is maximized. The fitness evaluation of PTT is done based on various attributes by making use of the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The model allows the software developers to select the number of PTTs as per their requirement. The individual performance of the modules is considered based on some performance properties. The reusability constraints are considered, as a PTT can be used in the same module to test different properties and/or it can be used in different modules to test same or different performance properties. A real-world case study from the domain of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is used to show the working of the suggested optimization model.

Decision-maker (DM) can assign the weights of the distance measures in the relative closeness of technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) for achieving his/her desirable ranking of alternatives. This phenomenon is called strategically setting distance measure weights in this study, which may affect the fairness of the results. In order to prevent this phenomenon, the idea of data envelopment analysis (DEA) is introduced to determine the objective weights of distance measures, and an improved TOPSIS is proposed in this study. The proposed method not only determines weights of the distance measures from an objective perspective and achieves the fully ranking of alternatives, but also provides the directions for improvement. Moreover, in comparison with the other methods, the advantages of the proposed method are analyzed, and the meanings and properties of the new relative closeness are discussed and proved. Finally, an example of evaluating the innovation development of high-tech industries in central and western regions of China is investigated to illustrate the effectiveness and the usefulness of the proposed method.

As a basic industry in the country’s development, the transportation industry has a significant relationship to its normal operation for developing and constructing the national economy. The increase in carbon emissions from transport is an increasingly growing problem, and countries worldwide are also taking measures to reduce emissions. Using time series data over the period from 1990 to 2016, this paper applies the visibility graph approach to transform it into a complex network and excavate some information about the data, then evaluates all countries based on the TOPSIS method. We find that the development of transportation is an important symbol to measure the degree of modernization of a country’s transportation, and low-income countries have lower carbon emissions due to slower transportation development. The results of transportation carbon emissions are especially encouraging for the Chinese government given its long-term and sustained efforts to expand railway and waterway infrastructure, and provide a new perspective for further research on the development trend of global transportation carbon emissions. Meanwhile, it is urgent to speed up the development and use of clean energy for economically developed countries.

Context: When the epidemic first broke out, no specific treatment was available for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The urgent need to end this unusual situation has resulted in many attempts to deal with SARS-CoV-2. In addition to several types of vaccinations that have been created, anti-SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have added a new dimension to preventative and treatment efforts. This therapy also helps prevent severe symptoms for those at a high risk. Therefore, this is one of the most promising treatments for mild to moderate SARS-CoV-2 cases. However, the availability of anti-SARS-CoV-2 mAb therapy is limited and leads to two main challenges. The first is the privacy challenge of selecting eligible patients from the distribution hospital networking, which requires data sharing, and the second is the prioritization of all eligible patients amongst the distribution hospitals according to dose availability. To our knowledge, no research combined the federated fundamental approach with multicriteria decision-making methods for the treatment of SARS-COV-2, indicating a research gap. Objective: This paper presents a unique sequence processing methodology that distributes anti-SARS-CoV-2 mAbs to eligible high-risk patients with SARS-CoV-2 based on medical requirements by using a novel federated decision-making distributor. Method: This paper proposes a novel federated decision-making distributor (FDMD) of anti-SARS-CoV-2 mAbs for eligible high-risk patients. FDMD is implemented on augmented data of 49,152 cases of patients with SARS-CoV-2 with mild and moderate symptoms. For proof of concept, three hospitals with 16 patients each are enrolled. The proposed FDMD is constructed from the two sides of claim sequencing: central federated server (CFS) and local machine (LM). The CFS includes five sequential phases synchronised with the LMs, namely, the preliminary criteria setting phase that determines the high-risk criteria, calculates their weights using the newly formulated interval-valued spherical fuzzy and hesitant 2-tuple fuzzy-weighted zero-inconsistency (IVSH2-FWZIC), and allocates their values. The subsequent phases are federation, dose availability confirmation, global prioritization of eligible patients and alerting the hospitals with the patients most eligible for receiving the anti-SARS-CoV-2 mAbs according to dose availability. The LM independently performs all local prioritization processes without sharing patients’ data using the provided criteria settings and federated parameters from the CFS via the proposed Federated TOPSIS (F-TOPSIS). The sequential processing steps are coherently performed at both sides. Results and Discussion: (1) The proposed FDMD efficiently and independently identifies the high-risk patients most eligible for receiving anti-SARS-CoV-2 mAbs at each local distribution hospital. The final decision at the CFS relies on the indexed patients’ score and dose availability without sharing the patients’ data. (2) The IVSH2-FWZIC effectively weighs the high-risk criteria of patients with SARS-CoV-2. (3) The local and global prioritization ranks of the F-TOPSIS for eligible patients are subjected to a systematic ranking validated by high correlation results across nine scenarios by altering the weights of the criteria. (4) A comparative analysis of the experimental results with a prior study confirms the effectiveness of the proposed FDMD. Conclusion: The proposed FDMD has the benefits of centrally distributing anti-SARS-CoV-2 mAbs to high-risk patients prioritized based on their eligibility and dose availability, and simultaneously protecting their privacy and offering an effective cure to prevent progression to severe SARS-CoV-2 hospitalization or death.

ABC analysis is a widespread classification technique designed to manage inventory items in an effective way by relaxing controls on low valued items and applying more rigorous controls on high valued items. In the literature, many classification models issued from different methodologies such as Mathematical Programming (MP), Metaheuristics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) are proposed to perform the ABC inventory classification. To the best of our knowledge, the cross-fertilization of classification models issued from different methodologies is rarely tackled in the literature. This paper proposes some hybrid classification models based on both Genetic Algorithm (Metaheuristics) and two MCDM methods (Weighted Sum (WS) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS)) to carry out the ABC inventory classification. To test the performance of the proposed classification models with respect to some existing models, a benchmark dataset from a Hospital Respiratory Therapy Unit (HRTU) is used. The computational results show that our proposed models outperformed the existing classification models according to some inventory performance measures. An additional performance analysis has also shown the effectiveness of our proposed models in inventory management.

Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia, is anticipated to experience an increase in energy consumption due to the growth of its manufacturing and industrial sectors, which aims to establish Vietnam as the world’s new production hub. Fossil fuels, which are ecologically unfriendly and quickly running out, are now Vietnam’s primary energy source. Due to the detrimental effects of fossil fuels on the environment, we can apply strategic decision-making in the industrial sector to choose the best alternative for a renewable energy resource (RER). RERs such as solar energy, wind energy, solid waste energy, biomass energy, geothermal energy, biofuel energy, and hydropower energy are important for generating energy and will be crucial for the survival of humanity, the planet, and other living things in the future. The actions of RER-based industrial development must be encouraged since they will make a significant contribution to overcome environmental impact limitations. The 2-tuple linguistic $q$-rung orthopair fuzzy set (2TL$q$-ROFS) is a novel development in fuzzy set theory that presents a decision-making method for selecting the most appropriate alternative. In this paper, we develop a family of the 2TL$q$-ROF Maclaurin symmetric mean aggregation operators such as the 2TL$q$-ROF Maclaurin symmetric mean (2TL$q$-ROFMSM) operator, the 2TL$q$-ROF dual Maclaurin symmetric mean (2TL$q$-ROFDMSM) operator and its weighted forms. We also look into a few of the proposed operators’ properties and special cases. Then based on 2TL$q$-ROFS, a new Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) model is constructed, which can use the decision makers’ preferences to get the optimum objective weights for attributes. Next, we extend the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method to 2TL$q$-ROF version which not only covers the uncertainty of human cognition but also gives decision makers a larger space to represent their decisions. Utilizing this model the best RER for Vietnam is selected. The outcomes of the hybrid 2TL$q$-ROF-DEMATEL-TOPSIS method reveal that among the energy resources, hydropower energy ranked highest, followed by biofuel energy.

The refugee problem is one of the most important issues facing the international community today. It not only troubles the countries where refugees are generated but also has a great impact on the countries where refugees are influx. With the continuous development of globalization, the refugee problem is no longer a problem of a country or a region, but a global problem faced by the international community. To cope with the global refugee problem, this paper analyzes the number of refugees in 156 countries from 1990 to 2020 and transforms the refugee population data of these countries into a complex network through a time series visibility graph (VG) method. First, we categorize the income level of 156 countries and analyze the impact of income level on the increase of refugee numbers. Then, the evaluation index of the number of refugees is obtained through the VG method. Finally, a TOPSIS comprehensive evaluation method based on the entropy weight approach is employed to analyze the data. This paper includes two main contributions. First, the application of the VG method provides a new perspective for enriching the modeling of the global refugee population growth trend. Second, this paper shows that the TOPSIS evaluation method based on the entropy weight method is effective, which provides a new method for further research on the global refugee population growth trend.

The control plane plays an essential role in the implementation of Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture. Basically, the control plane is an isolated process and operates on control layer. The control layer encompasses controllers which provide a global view of the entire SDN. The Controller selection is more crucial for the network administrator to meet the specific use case. This research work mainly focuses on obtaining a better SDN controller. Initially, the SDN controllers are selected using integrated Analytic Hierarchy Process and Technique for Order Preference Similarity to Ideal Solution (AHP and TOPSIS) method. It facilitates to select minimal number of controllers based on their features in the SDN application. Finally, the performance evaluation is carried out using the CBENCH tool considering the best four ranked controllers obtained from the previous step. In addition, it is validated with the real-time internet topology such as Abilene and ERNET considering the delay factor. The result shows that the “Floodlight” controller responds better for latency and throughput. The selection of an optimum controller-Floodlight, using the real-world Internet topologies, outperforms in obtaining the path with a 28.57% decrease in delay in Abilene and 16.94% in ERNET. The proposed work can be applied in high traffic SDN applications.

This paper realizes the implementation of Improved Multi-objective Mayfly Algorithm (IMOMA) for getting optimal solutions related to optimal power flow problem with smooth and nonsmooth fuel cost coefficients. It is performed by considering Simulated Binary Crossover, polynomial mutation and dynamic crowding distance in the existing Multi-objective Mayfly Algorithm. The optimal power flow problem is formulated as a Multi-objective Optimization Problem that consists of different objective functions, viz. fuel cost with/ without valve point loading effect, active power losses, voltage deviation and voltage stability. The performance of Improved Multi-objective Mayfly Algorithm is interpreted in terms of the present Multi-objective Mayfly Algorithm and Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II. The algorithms are applied under different operating scenarios of the IEEE 30-bus test system, 62-bus Indian utility system and IEEE 118-bus test system with different combinations of objective functions. The obtained Pareto fronts achieved through the implementation of Improved Multi-objective Mayfly Algorithm, Multi-objective Mayfly Algorithm and Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II are compared with the reference Pareto front attained by using weighted sum method based on the Covariance Matrix-adapted Evolution Strategy method. The performances of these algorithms are individually analyzed and validated by considering the performance metrics such as convergence, divergence, generational distance, inverted generational distance, minimum spacing, spread and spacing. The best compromising solution is achieved by implementing the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution method. The overall result has shown the effectiveness of Improved Multi-objective Mayfly Algorithm for solving multi-objective optimal power flow problem.

Time, cost, and quality are the three indispensable factors for the realization and success of a project. In this context, we propose a framework composed of a multi-objective approach and multi-criteria decision-making methods (MCDM) to solve time-cost-quality trade-off optimization problems. A multi-objective Simulated Annealing (MOSA) algorithm is used to compute an approximation to the Pareto optimal set. The concept of the exploratory grid is introduced in the MOSA to improve its performance. MCDM are used to assist the decision-making process. The Shannon entropy and AHP methods assign weights to criteria. The first methodology is for the inexperienced decision-makers, and the second concedes a personal and flexible weighting of the criteria weights, based on the project manager’s assessment. The TOPSIS and VIKOR methods are considered to rank the solutions. Although they have the same purpose, the rankings achieved are different. A tool is implemented to solve a time-cost-quality trade-off problem on a project activities network. The computational experiments are analyzed and the results with the exploratory grid in Simulated Annealing (SA) are promising. Despite the framework aims to solve multi-objective trade-off optimization problems, supporting the decisions of the project manager, the methodologies used can also be applied in other areas.

Websites of environmental content constitute an important tool for promoting environmental information, affect environmental attitudes and promote protected areas as touristic destinations. However, these websites have to be evaluated to ensure that they reach their final goal. The use of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) models in website evaluation is relatively new and not many models have been tested for this purpose. Comparisons of such models have been implemented in various domains but not for the purposes of environmental website evaluation. The main objective of this paper is on presenting the procedure of comparison of MCDM models spherical by providing in detail the steps that have to be followed. This process was implemented for website evaluation and investigated the comparative performance of the TOPSIS and VIKOR models. This comparison process involves reliability analysis of the questionnaire and the sample of decision makers, pairwise comparisons of the models by calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient and estimation of the Cohen’s Kappa for testing the inter-rater comparability, using the models as raters. Furthermore, a sensitivity and robustness analysis of those models is implemented, which also has not been implemented before in the application of those models in website evaluation. The tests implemented and presented in this paper reveal that the reasonable disagreement that was often observed among the methods did not affect their reliability. As a result, MCDM models proved very effective for evaluating websites of environmental content.