This paper proposes a mathematical model to deal with project scheduling problem under vagueness and a framework of a heuristic approach to fuzzy resource-constrained project scheduling problem (F-RCPSP) using heuristic and metaheuristic scheduling methods. Our approach is very simple to apply, and it does not require knowing the explicit form of the membership functions of the fuzzy activity times. We first identify two typical activity priority rules, namely, resource over time and minimum slack priority rules. They are used in the F-RCPS problem and in the initial solution of Taboo search (TS) method. We improved the TS algorithm method for the solution of F-RCPSP. Our objective is to check the performance of these rules and metaheuristic method in minimizing the project completion time for the F-RCPS problems. In our study, we use trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (TraFNs) for activity times and activity-on-nodes (AON) representation and compute several project characteristics such as earliest, latest, and slack times in terms of TraFNs. The computational experiment shows that the performance of the proposed TS is better than the evaluation and light beam search algorithms in the literature. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

R&D project selection decision is very important in two ways. First, in many organizations, R&D budget represents huge investment. Project selection decisions could be thought with the strategic objectives and plans of the firm. Second, R&D projects' organizational returns are multidimensional in nature and risky in terms of projected outcome. Real options approach helps to calculate this risky side of the selection process. This paper considers that multidimensional side of the R&D project selection process. Another consideration is the vagueness in the evaluation process. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, which takes monetary (fuzzy real option value) and nonmonetary (capability, success probability, trends, etc.) criteria into account, is used to make this selection among alternative R&D projects. A real case study is given to illustrate the application of the proposed approach. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The e-Government agenda is being pursued throughout the world to one degree or another, but it has added significance in Central Europe. The region is just beginning to emerge from a period of far-reaching political and economic transformation following the collapse of repressive communist systems. For these countries, e-Government is more than simply a new channel of delivering services; it offers an opportunity to achieve a quantum leap in transparency and efficiency of administration, which the region's leaders have promised their citizens since the early 1990s. Turkey is currently working hard to catch this opportunity. Turkish Government has initiated the Urgent Action Plan in December 2002 to remedy long-lasting economic problems and to improve social and well-being of the country. One of the basic components of this plan is ‘e-Transformation Turkey Project’ which aims to carry Turkey into Information society. One of the two purposes of this study is to define and to prioritize the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) groups and their subfactors for e-Government in Turkey. The other purpose is to determine and to evaluate the alternative strategies for e-Government applications at the national level in Turkey. We use the SWOT approach in combination with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to achieve this task. The strategies have been prioritized and sensitivity analyses of the obtained results have been made using a software.

To increase customer satisfaction, quality function deployment is used to translate customer needs into technical design requirements (DRs). Determination of DRs for product development is very important because these requirements are the vital keys to successful products. The methods used to evaluate DRs in the literature can be categorized into multicriteria evaluation methods such as scoring methods, the analytic hierarchy method, analytic network process, and so forth. There are few papers using fuzzy multi-attribute outranking methods to evaluate DRs. This article aims to compare the results of three different fuzzy outranking methods to evaluate the DRs in the PVC windows industry. A sensitivity analysis is also made by using the software, FOuR. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 1229–1250, 2007.

E-service evaluation is a complex problem in which many qualitative attributes must be considered. These kinds of attributes make the evaluation process hard and vague. Cost–benefit analyses applied to various areas are usually based on the data under certainty or risk. In case of uncertain, vague, and/or linguistic data, the fuzzy set theory can be used to handle the analysis. In this article, after the evaluation attributes of e-services and the fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making methods are introduced, a fuzzy hierarchical TOPSIS model is developed and applied to an e-service provider selection problem with some sensitivity analyses. The developed model is a useful tool for the companies that prefer outsourcing for e-activities. It is shown that service systems can be effectively evaluated by the proposed method. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 547–565, 2007.

Projects are critical to the realization of performing organization's strategies. Each project contains some degree of risk and it is required to be aware of these risks and to develop the necessary responses to get the desired level of project success. Because projects' risks are multidimensional, they must be evaluated by using multi-attribute decision-making methods. The aim of this article is to provide an analytic tool to evaluate the project risks under incomplete and vague information. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as a suitable and practical way of evaluating project risks based on the heuristic knowledge of experts is used to evaluate the riskiness of an information technology (IT) project of a Turkish firm. The means of the triangular fuzzy numbers produced by the IT experts for each comparison are successfully used in the pairwise comparison matrices. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 21: 559–584, 2006.

Quality function deployment (QFD) has been used to translate customer needs (CNs) and wants into technical design requirements (DRs) in order to increase customer satisfaction. QFD uses the house of quality (HOQ), which is a matrix providing a conceptual map for the design process, as a construct for understanding CNs and establishing priorities of DRs to satisfy them. This article uses the analytic network process (ANP), the general form of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), to prioritize DRs by taking into account the degree of the interdependence between the CNs and DRs and the inner dependence among them. In addition, because human judgment on the importance of requirements is always imprecise and vague, this work concentrates on a fuzzy ANP approach in which triangular fuzzy numbers are used to improve the quality of the responsiveness to CNs and DRs. A numerical example is presented to show the proposed methodology. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The major contribution of fuzzy set theory is its capability of representing vague data. Fuzzy logic offers a systematic base in dealing with situations that are ambiguous or not well defined. In the literature, there exist some fuzzy control charts developed for linguistic data that are mainly based on membership and probabilistic approaches. In this article, α-cut control charts for attributes are developed. This approach provides the ability of determining the tightness of the inspection by selecting a suitable α-level: The higher α the tighter inspection. The article also presents a numerical example and interprets and compares other results with the approaches developed previously. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 19: 1173–1195, 2004.

The parametric tests often require that the population distributions be normal or approximately so. Statistical methods that do not require the knowledge of the population distribution or its parameters are called nonparametric tests. In this article, first we review some industrial applications of fuzzy parametric tests. Then we present some new algorithms for fuzzy nonparametric tests, namely a fuzzy sign test and a fuzzy Wilcoxon signed-ranks test. Later, we further give fuzzy parametric tests, fuzzy nonparametric tests, and their numerical applications, and also provide a comparison study on crisp and fuzzy nonparametric tests. When the data are vague, the result of the fuzzy nonparametric tests may be different from that of the crisp nonparametric tests. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 19: 1069–1087, 2004.