Sustainable High-Tech Brick Production with Energy-Oriented Consumption: An Integrated Possibilistic Approach Based on Criteria Interdependencies

Brick making contributes significantly to the of supply materials for the building industry. The majority of brick production sectors, especially in developing countries, employ polluting and energy-inefficient technologies. Due to the increasing pressures on manufacturing firms to improve economic performance and growing environmental protection issues, sustainable and clean production is the main concern for brick makers. This paper considers the technological, economic, environmental, social, and energy-oriented criteria to select the optimal brick production technologies. Therefore, technology selection is viewed as a multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problem. This research proposes a novel hybrid fuzzy MCGDM (HFMCGDM) model to tackle the problem. In this respect, first of all, the modified triangular fuzzy pair-wise comparison (MTFPC) method is proposed to compute the local weights of criteria and sub-criteria. Then, a fuzzy DEMATEL (FDEMATEL) method is presented to calculate the interdependencies between and within the criteria. Moreover, the integration of MTFPC and FDEMATEL methods is applied to calculate the global criteria weights. Afterward, a novel method is proposed to determine the experts’ weight. Considering the last aggregation approach to diminish data loss, a new version of a fuzzy TOPSIS method is proposed to find the local and global priorities of the candidates. Then, a case study is given to demonstrate the applicability and superiority of the proposed methodology. To get a deeper view about considering kilns, energy and environmental performance of which has been investigated. Moreover, a comparative analysis is presented to illuminate the merits of the proposed methodology. Eventually, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to peruse the influence of criteria weights on ranking order.

SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT SELECTION BY A NEW GROUP DECISION-MAKING FRAMEWORK INTRODUCING MORAS METHOD IN AN INTERVAL TYPE 2 FUZZY ENVIRONMENT

Project management is a process that is involved with making important decisions under uncertainty. In project management often the existing data is limited and vague. Sustainable project selection has a multi-criteria evaluation nature which calls for attending to various often conflicting factors under vagueness. To deal with sustainable project selection several important factors should be properly considered. In this paper, in order to provide a new multi-criteria project selection method, a novel last aggregation method is presented. This method has several main novelties. First, to address uncertainty interval type 2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs) are used. Second, the importance of criteria is investigated by using IT2F entropy. Third, a novel index for decision making is presented that has the merits of ratio system in MOORA and COPRAS, named MORAS. Fourth, the weights of decision makers are computed according to the obtained judgments and the weights are employed to aggregate the results. Fifth, the defuzzification is carried out in the last step of the process by means of a new IT2F ranking method. To present the applicability of the method, it is used in an existing case study in the literature and the outcomes are presented.

Selection of Telecommunication Access Networks

The development of Internet technology and computer networks leads to the convergence of traditional systems voice, video and data into a unique IP-based TriplePlay system. Differences in implementing TriplePlay service basically come down to the choice of technology of data transmission from the last aggregation point (node) to a subscriber (Last Mile). Analyzing Internet market, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) made trend in increasing demand for bandwidth during the period from 2007 to 2017. The analysis is based on SmartHome concept which includes broadband internet as well as multimedia services such as IPTV, cell phones and so on. The results of the analysis to a great extent confirm increasing trend of the consumers’ demand for bandwidth defined by Jakob Nielsen. His theory is based on the previous period and predicts that the need for bandwidth will rise by 50% every year. Nielsen’s diagram resembles that of Moore which predicts that CPU power will double every 18 months, that is 67% a year. The constant alterations in market and technology causes dilemma to operators in terms of investment. It is quite difficult to answer the question about the choice of technology of connecting the subscribers from the aspect of both technological and economic justification. Finding the answer to this question is the main goal of this paper.