scholarly journals Building a Composite Indicator to Measure Environmental Sustainability Using Alternative Weighting Methods

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 4398 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Gómez-Limón ◽  
Manuel Arriaza ◽  
M. Guerrero-Baena

Environmental sustainability in agriculture can be measured through the construction of composite indicators. However, this is a challenging task because these indexes are heavily dependent on how the individual base indicators are weighted. The main aim of this paper is to contribute to the existing literature regarding the robustness of subjective (based on experts’ opinions) weighting methods when constructing a composite indicator for measuring environmental sustainability at the farm level. In particular, the study analyzes two multi-criteria techniques, the analytic hierarchy process and the recently developed best-worst method, as well as the more straightforward point allocation method. These alternative methods have been implemented to empirically assess the environmental performance of irrigated olive farms in Spain. Data for this case study were collected from a panel of 22 experts and a survey of 99 farms. The results obtained suggest that there are no statistically significant differences in the weights of the individual base indicators derived from the three weighting methods considered. Moreover, the ranking of the sampled farms, in terms of their level of environmental sustainability measured through the composite indicators proposed, is not dependent on the use of the different weighting methods. Thus, the results support the robustness of the three weighting methods considered.

Author(s):  
Leandro Pecchia ◽  
Jennifer L Martin ◽  
Angela Ragozzino ◽  
Carmela Vanzanella ◽  
Arturo Scognamiglio ◽  
...  

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chintala Venkateswarlu ◽  
A. K. Birru

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology that extracts client demands (CDs) and inducting them in the final service/product. Once CDs are extracted from client the traditional QFD approach uses absolute importance to identify the degree of importance for each CD. Direct evaluation of CDs based on absolute weighting without tradeoffs is easy to perform, but may lead to serious deviations from reality. An alternative to avoid this problem is to adopt the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach. In this paper, an integrated model combining AHP and QFD has been delineated as a quality achievement tool in healthcare. A case study is performed on the healthcare services provided by government general hospital, Indore District, Madhya Pradesh, India and data has been analyzed to benchmark the proposed framework by computing the degree of relative importance for CDs through AHP and incorporating them in subsequent deployment matrices.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erki Eessaar ◽  
Marek Soobik

It is possible to produce different database designs based on the same set of requirements to a database. In this paper, we present a decision support method for comparing different database designs and for selecting one of them as the best design. Each data model is an abstract language that can be used to create many different databases. The proposed method is flexible in the sense that it can be used in case of different data models, criteria, and designs. The method is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process and uses pairwise comparisons. We also present a case study about comparing four designs of SQL databases in case of PostgreSQL? database management system. The results depend on the context where the designs will be used. Hence, we evaluate the designs in case of two different contexts - management of measurements data and an online transaction processing system.


2016 ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
Milena Lakicevic ◽  
Bojan Srdjevic ◽  
Ivaylo Velichkov ◽  
Zorica Srdjevic

The paper investigates how different hierarchy structuring in analytic hierarchy process (AHP) may affect the final results in the decision-making process. This problem is analyzed in a case study of the Rila monastery forest stands in Bulgaria. There were three similar and mutually overlapped hierarchies defined. A decision maker evaluated all of them and after analyzing final results and consistency performance, he selected and revised the most appropriate hierarchy structure. Consistency check assisted in detecting the judgments which have strongly violated evaluation procedure. These mistakes are interpreted as a consequence of a large number of required pair-wise comparisons. The paper emphases the importance of properly defining hierarchy structure and recommends using consistency analysis as a guide and not as a directive for the revision of judgments.


Author(s):  
Rodrigo Barbosa de Santis ◽  
Leonardo Golliat ◽  
Eduardo Pestana de Aguiar

The supplier selection problem has been discussed in literature within the supply chain management subject and it is extremely important due to its impact on the entire supply chain configuration, strategy and performance. This work presents a decision model based on the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method and its application in a real case of maintenance supplier selection in a large Brazilian railway operator. Eight criteria were adopted - technical capacity, financial status, relationship, operations management, security management, infrastructure, historic performance and costs - for evaluating five potential suppliers. In the case study, both first and second ranked suppliers by the method have been selected by the company for providing the services and the model was adopted as a standard procedure within the organization for contracts over US$ 300,000.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (06) ◽  
pp. 1693-1724 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wanying Xie ◽  
Zeshui Xu ◽  
Zhiliang Ren ◽  
Hai Wang

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is one of the most favorable decision tools for dealing with complex decision-making problems. Probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS) is an up-to-date tool to deal with uncertain information in the decision-making process. In this paper, we extend the AHP to the probabilistic linguistic environment for perfecting the modeling ability of AHP in various decision-making problems. In order to apply the PLTSs to the AHP properly, we first redefine the probabilistic linguistic comparison matrix (PLCM) and propose a new consistency index. Then, we propose a new approach to check and improve the consistency of the PLCMs. After that, we aggregate the individual PLCMs into the collective PLCM and derive the priorities of the collective PLCM. Finally, we combine the priorities with the decision matrix to complete the ranking of alternatives, and a case concerning the performance assessments of three new areas is given and the comparative analysis about the results is performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.


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