Sharif Digital Repository

Technology Identification involves developing a list of technologies which are, or may be, incorporated into products or processes. After reviewing Technology Assessment, Technology Strategy, Management of Technology and New Product Development in literature, four methods of Technology Identification are investigated: Value Chain of Technologies, Process-based Approach, Quality Function Deployment and Technology Mapping. A model facilitating decision making process is then proposed by which the most appropriate method to be employed is identified. The proposed model is examined in specific case of fuel cell technologies while preparing the Fuel cell Development Strategic Plan of Iran. 1... 

Design and implementation of Architecture is a knowledge-driven process. Evaluation and verification the knowledge, in order to ensure its quality, have important role in improving overall design process. Furthermore, Architectural decision making is a complex and multi-criteria decision making problem in which multiple stakeholders make decisions from their perspectives causing overlaps and conflicts in the adopted decisions. Therefore, the requirement for strategies to manage these issues and also to improve coordination and cooperation among the various stakeholders to improve the overall process design is necessary. In this regard, there have been several activities that focus on... 

Despite a substantial potential of renewable energy sources, the current energy supply system in Iran relies almost entirely on fossil fuel resources. It has imposed significant financial burden on the country and has led to considerable GHG emissions. Moreover, the country is confronting several challenges for harnessing alternative clean energy sources and promoting rational energy policies over the recent decades. To probe the root cause of these problems, this paper first provides an overview on the previous energy planning attempts in Iran. It shows that adequate commitment to a long-term energy planning could have meaningfully prevented these serious challenges. However, the previous... 

This paper presents a mathematical model describing how the physicians actually make a diagnostic decision. Next to a description of diagnostic decision making as done by the physicians, this paper shows that how can we design and develop a new approach to medical diagnosis based on the human principles of decision making. The model was challenged to diagnose a series of actual patients. Real clinical data was entered into the model and the system produced a ranked list of possible diagnoses for each case. The results indicated good performance when compared with internist's diagnosis. The proposed method is effective and can be applied to describe medical reasoning as done by the... 

Heaters are one of the central parts of natural gas reduction stations using turboexpanders to prevent the formation of hydrate and corrosion failure. This study intends to design a fired heater by applying a combustion sub-model to derive an optimal model for this kind of application. This model is developed to accurately consider all subsections of the fired heater namely radiation, convection, and shield sections, as well as flue gas composition, and its volume. Within this context, a multi-objective optimization is employed to identify the optimal design of the gas-fired heater in the natural gas reduction station for the Ramin power plant case study. The total economic and environmental... 

This paper aims to propose a framework by which decision-makers can evaluate and compare alternatives for sustainable island-based tourism development. The uncertainties and risks involved in information and judgment within the evaluation process were taken into account by using a hybrid approach, which combined the Delphi method, fuzzy set theory, and a discrete multi-criteria method based on prospect theory called TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multiple-criteria decision making). The decision making model examined 3 different techniques for aggregating the viewpoints of different decision-makers and explored how the aggregation technique would affect the ranking of the... 

The present article aims to investigate the cause-and-effect relationship between the employees’ psychological empowerment (PE) and dimensions of knowledge management (KM) in an oil company, using the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method. The study population consists of oil company experts. The sample size is determined based on the theoretical saturation limit. The present findings show that PE is the strongest causative factor with significant effects on knowledge creation (KC) and knowledge dissemination (KD). Among the KM dimensions, the most influential factors are the dimensions of KC, knowledge application, and knowledge capture (KCA). Of all KM dimensions,... 

The use of hybrid renewable energy has increased in recent years due to the growing environmental concerns caused by the consumption of fossil fuels. The purpose of this study was the economic-environmental feasibility of using hybrid energy systems in one of the most polluted and populated provinces in Iran, Isfahan province. Various components of the hybrid energy system such as wind turbine (WT), photovoltaic panel (PV), diesel generator (DG), converter (CV) along with two scenarios of energy storage including battery (BT) and hydrogen storage have been considered in modeling the energy system. Six scenarios were considered based on the combination of different components for supplying... 

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a method to measure the efficiency of a DMU (Decision Making Unit, e.g. school, public agencies and banks). One of the ways for determining rank of DMUs is efficient score of each DMU. An interesting research issues is to discriminate between efficient DMUs. In literatures, supper efficiency is an applicable method for ranking efficient DMUs. The main drawback of this method is an inability of this method to rank non-extreme efficient DMUs. Therefore, this issue reduces the usefulness of this method. In this paper we propose a new ranking system for non-extreme efficient DMUs (Decision Making Units) based upon the omission of DMUs from reference set of the... 

Financial performance evaluation is a very crucial process for industries in current highly competitive environment. Therefore, designing an accurate and appropriate performance evaluation framework is beneficial for insiders and also shareholders of a company. To evaluate financial performance, we need to consider some financial indicators that reflect the competitiveness of a company. There are many financial indicators and criteria that are vague and can be regarded as a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In this paper, we developed a new financial performance evaluation framework to rank the companies in Iranian petrochemical industry based on fuzzy MCDM approach. To... 

Information technology (IT) outsourcing has been recognized as a new methodology in many organizations. Yet making an appropriate decision with regard to selection and use of these methodologies may impose uncertainties and risks. Estimating the occurrence probability of risks and their impacts organizations goals may reduce their threats. In this study, an extended analytical hierarchical process method is tailored based on interval-valued hesitant fuzzy information to assess the risks in IT outsourcing. In the proposed approach, the weight of each decision maker is implemented in process of the proposed method by considering the concept of simple additive weighting method to decrease the... 

A novel approach in Terrain Following/Terrain Avoidance (TF/TA) flight is proposed that facilitates flying over unknown terrains. Intelligency is implemented using fuzzy decision making tools. This method can be used in offline design in trajectory planning which has wide applications in TF/TA. A relationship b etween slope of terrain and aircraft height with speed of aircraft is constructed by fuzzy approach  

The growing importance of energy consumption has become an integral part of many decision-making processes in various organizations. In this paper, a framework is proposed for an organization where the undertaken project is implemented by multi-skilled workforce and energy tariffs depending on the time-of-use. This is a real-life situation where energy tariffs are significantly high during the peak demand compared to the one in off peak demand in order to control overloaded consumption of energy. A formulation is developed for the problem to minimize the total cost of consuming required energy. The proposed formulation is validated using several small-scale instances solved by GAMS software.... 

In this paper we propose a modified Fuzzy Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (modified Fuzzy TOPSIS) for the Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem when there is a group of decision makers. Regarding the value of the truth that a fuzzy number is greater than or equal to another fuzzy number, a new distance measure is proposed in this paper. This distance measure calculates the distance of each fuzzy number from both Fuzzy Positive Ideal Solution (FPIS) and Fuzzy negative Ideal Solution (FNIS). Then, the alternative which is simultaneously closer to FPIS and farther from FNIS will be selected as the best choice. To clarify our proposed procedure, a... 

In the real world, there are complex decision-making problems in which a variety of intertwined factors and hierarchical structures exist, and it is difficult or impossible to solve these problems using classical methods. The prioritization of circular economy (CE) adoption barriers is one such complex problem that cannot be solved using current classical methods. Hence, in this paper, for the first time, a new method, namely, FBWDS, is developed. FBWDS derives from the combination of fuzzy best–worst method (BWM), fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), and Supermatrix structure. This proposed method establishes weights of the intertwined factors in hierarchical... 

The tourism and hospitality industry significantly impacts socio-economic development and cultural growth in developing countries. This study develops an integrated multicriteria decision-making and optimization model for partner selection in public-private partnership (PPP) projects in the hospitality industry. The proposed model uses a weighted influence non-linear gauge system to evaluate the partners. A multi-objective optimization model is then utilized to select a partner for each PPP project using a linear programming metric solution approach. A case study demonstrates the applicability of the proposed model in a PPP project in Iran to renovate and convert historic houses into hotels... 

Risk aversion is a prevalent phenomenon when sufficiently large amounts are at risk. In this paper, we introduce a new prescriptive approach for coping with risk in sequential decision problems with discrete scenario space. We use Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) risk measure as optimization criterion and prove that there is an explicit linear representation of the proposed model for the problem  

Evaluation of a project and its contractors has considerable importance in gas well-drilling projects due to their high investments and worth. In this paper, the quality of some gas well-drilling projects is analyzed in order to evaluate and grade project tasks. A neuro-fuzzy network is utilized to learn the grading process and generate models. To select among these models, a ranking method, namely technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is employed. During seven gas well-drilling projects, 77 tasks are studied based on quality practitioners[U+05F3] points of view. After generating the primary models, three indices namely, root mean square error (RMSE),...