Fuzzy decision support system for ship lock control

This paper presents the development of a Decision Support System (DSS) for the management of ship locks that relies on fuzzy logic. It contains a brief overview of the history and the construction of locks and basic information related to fuzzy logic, fuzzy linguistic variables and methods used in approximate reasoning. In reality, ship lock control is mostly based on the subjective estimations and the experience of a lock master (ship lock operator). The fuzzy set theory is the most favourable mathematical approach for consideration of indefiniteness and subjective estimates. This paper analyses the control process of a ship lock on a two-way waterway, with one chamber designed for one vessel. A control algorithm is constructed according to a set of linguistic rules that describes the operator’s control strategy. The subjective estimations are therefore implemented in the algorithm as fuzzy sets. Fuzzy rules aggregate the final fuzzy set and defuzzification produces a decision. A set of ship traffic data is generated for analysis and simulation purposes based on the annual distribution of ship arrivals at the lock. Two criteria are presented and used in parallel with the Fuzzy DSS (FDSS). These two extreme criteria reflect the interests of shippers on one side and workers and owners of the lock on the other side. These interests occur in actual systems and are used here to evaluate the results obtained using the FDSS. This paper additionally describes the design of the SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) software. This software relies on a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) and provides a platform on which to implement the desired fuzzy algorithm. The software was developed with the suggestions of operators who have extensive experience in ship lock control. The presented control system can be used for support in decision making in control processes and in the training of new operators of ship locks.     

Fuzzy logic-based decision support system for automating ergonomics risk assessments

Workers in the modular construction industry are frequently exposed to ergonomic risks, which may lead to injuries and lower productivity. In light of this, researchers have proposed a number of ergonomics risk assessment methods to identify design flaws in work systems, thereby reducing ergonomic discomfort and boosting workplace productivity. However, organizations often disregard ergonomics risk assessments due to a lack of convenient tools and knowledge. Therefore, this study proposes a fuzzy logic-based decision support system to help practitioners to automatically and comprehensively assess the ergonomic performance of work systems. For comprehensive assessment of ergonomic risk, the proposed decision support system considers physical, environmental, and sensory factors. Specifically, the decision support system comprises eight fuzzy expert systems that output a composite risk score, called an “ergonomic risk indicator”, that indicates the overall level of ergonomic risk present in a given work system. The performance of the proposed decision support system is then evaluated using a real-world case study in a modular construction facility by comparing the results of the decision support system with the facility's occupational injury reports. The results prove the effectiveness of the decision support system. Overall, the decision support system is capable of generating a composite risk score, the ergonomic risk indicator, and the proposed high-level architecture and design represent significant contributions for the enhancement of health and safety in the modular construction industry.     

Fuzzy queries, search, and decision support system

 The process of ranking (scoring) has been used to make billions of financing decisions each year serving an industry worth hundreds of billion of dollars. To a lesser extent, ranking has also been used to process hundreds of millions of applications by U.S. Universities resulting in over 15 million college admissions in the year 2000 for a total revenue of over $250 billion. College admissions are expected to reach over 17 million by the year 2010 for total revenue of over $280 billion. In this paper, we will introduce fuzzy query and fuzzy aggregation as an alternative for ranking and predicting the risk for credit scoring and university admissions, which currently utilize an imprecise and subjective process. In addition we will introduce the BISC Decision Support System. The main key features of the BISC Decision Support System for the internet applications are (1) to use intelligently the vast amounts of important data in organizations in an optimum way as a decision support system and (2) to share intelligently and securely company's data internally and with business partners and customers that can be process quickly by end users.     

Fuzzy methods for case-based recommendation and decision support

The paper proposes two case-based methods for recommending decisions to users on the basis of information stored in a database. In both approaches, fuzzy sets and related (approximate) reasoning techniques are used for modeling user preferences and decision principles in a flexible manner. The first approach, case-based decision making, can principally be seen as a case-based counterpart to classical decision principles well-known from statistical decision theory. The second approach, called case-based elicitation, combines aspects from flexible querying of databases and case-based prediction. Roughly, imagine a user who aims at choosing an optimal alternative among a given set of options. The preferences with respect to these alternatives are formalized in terms of flexible constraints, the expression of which refers to cases stored in a database. As both types of decision support might provide useful tools for recommender systems, we also place the methods in a broader context and discuss the role of fuzzy set theory in some related fields.     

Fuzzy stochastic dynamic programming for marketing decision support

One of the most important goals in marketing is to realize the highest profit by applying appropriate means to optimize the process of acquiring customers. To assist the marketer in making marketing decisions, this paper introduces a stochastic dynamic programming model for the process of acquiring customers. It is actually a stochastic multistage decision process, whose state space consists of granularized information on customers and whose transitions are controlled by marketing actions. Then it shows how to control this process using fuzzy constraints and how to characterize the goal of maximizing profit by a fuzzy set. After an overview of approaches in dynamic programming under fuzziness given by Bellman and Zadeh, this paper further presents a new model of fuzzy stochastic dynamic programming to solve the decision problem for a stochastic system with implicitly defined termination time. It is argued that this study can facilitate research and development of both financial engineering and e‐commerce. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Fuzzy cognitive map architectures for medical decision support systems

Medical decision support systems can provide assistance in crucial clinical judgments, particularly for inexperienced medical professionals. Fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) is a soft computing technique for modeling complex systems, which follows an approach similar to human reasoning and the human decision-making process. FCMs can successfully represent knowledge and human experience, introducing concepts to represent the essential elements and the cause and effect relationships among the concepts to model the behavior of any system. Medical decision systems are complex systems that can be decomposed to non-related and related subsystems and elements, where many factors have to be taken into consideration that may be complementary, contradictory, and competitive; these factors influence each other and determine the overall clinical decision with a different degree. Thus, FCMs are suitable for medical decision support systems and appropriate FCM architectures are proposed and developed as well as the corresponding examples from two medical disciplines, i.e. speech and language pathology and obstetrics, are described.     

基于PDA的架设制式桥决策支持系统

为使部队准确、快速地架设制式桥梁,确保能够快速、精确地进行机动工程保障,建立了基于个人数码助理(PDA)的架设制式桥行动辅助决策系统,指导部队进行制式桥梁架设,并使其能够在野外作业的条件下方便使用。PDA的使用不受野外条件的限制而且便于作业人员随时携带,并能在各种条件下全天候使用,是辅助决策系统的理想平台。     

Multimodel decision support system for psychiatry problem

Psychological distress and disabilities are increasingly identified among general population. Psychiatrist availability in rural areas is poor and often general practitioners have to identify and treat psychiatric problems like depression and anxiety. This work proposes a method to identify the psychiatric problems among patients using multimodel decision support system. Backpropagation neural networks (BPNN), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) and support vector machine (SVM) models are used to design the decision support system. Forty-four factors are considered for feature extraction. The features are collected from 400 patients and divided into four sets of equal size. Three sets of patient features are used to train the decision support system and one set of patient feature are used to evaluate performance of the system. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 98.75% for identifying the psychiatric problems.     

A decision support system for college selection

In this changing society the importance of higher education is increasing more than ever before. The selection of an appropriate university or college is of vital importance to the student for acquisition of proper educational experience. There are thousands of universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. The information available to students about each college is plentiful but is rather tedious to be obtained. The decision process of college selection is further complicated by many factors such as tuition, location, rank, size of the universities, and so forth. These factors play an important role in the final selection of a college. Therefore, a computer-based decision support system is developed in this paper to help users make better decisions in the selection of a college.

This college selection decision support system is designed to be menu-driven and highly user-friendly with a “Help” utility. Many “what-if” scenarios are also available in this system. It can be run on any IBM XT/AT or compatible machines with a DOS environment. It will allow users to make better decisions in their college selection process.     

A manufacturing decision support system for flamecutting

The design of a Manufacturing Decision Support System (MDSS) for the control of a flamecutting operation is discussed. The MDSS incorporates the overall economics of a continuing inventory. It also takes into account the use of left-over offcuts or partial plates, and the possibility of producing as a flow shop instead of on a job shop cut-to-order basis. Some research results are available that aid the construction of such a DSS; these are mostly in the areas of two-dimensional parts' layout and torch path sequencing. The proposed DSS constructs parts' nests, generates cutting sequences, directs the use of trim margins, and updates and outputs the economics of the whole cutting process. Its major strength is its potential use at the shop floor level, using relatively inexpensive computing power to control cutting torches that are usually driven by far more expensive systems that take much longer to determine layouts and cutting sequences.     

A decision support system for cellular manufacturing system design

With the growth of competitive pressure in the global markets, there has been an increase in demand in industry for cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs) in order to improve productivity and process flexibility. The design of CMSs for industrial applications is a complex and knowledge intensive process as it involves the consideration of many factors including production data and process characteristics. This paper describes the development and implementation of a decision support system for the feasibility and conceptual design of CMSs. The system is based on the knowledge-based system approach, and is able to make recommendations of system feasibility, cell formation techniques and cell types. A case study is also presented to demonstrate the capability of the decision support system.     

Applying a decision support system

Decision support systems (DSS) are in use in a major retail organization for a variety of purposes. One is being used to monitor a change of strategy within the retail outlets. Accountants, engineers, local and senior management are finding uses for DSS.     

Fuzzy AHP-based decision support system for selecting ERP systems in textile industry by using balanced scorecard

An enterprise resource planning system (ERP) is the information backbone of a company that integrates and automates all business operations. It is a critical issue to select the suitable ERP system which meets all the business strategies and the goals of the company. This study presents an approach to select a suitable ERP system for textile industry. Textile companies have some difficulties to implement ERP systems such as variant structure of products, production variety and unqualified human resources. At first, the vision and the strategies of the organization are checked by using balanced scorecard. According to the company’s vision, strategies and KPIs, we can prepare a request for proposal. Then ERP packages that do not meet the requirements of the company are eliminated. After strategic management phase, the proposed methodology gives advice before ERP selection. The criteria were determined and then compared according to their importance. The rest ERP system solutions were selected to evaluate. An external evaluation team consisting of ERP consultants was assigned to select one of these solutions according to the predetermined criteria. In this study, the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, a fuzzy extension of the multi-criteria decision-making technique AHP, was used to compare these ERP system solutions. The methodology was applied for a textile manufacturing company.     

Pollution prevention decision support system

This paper presents a decision support system developed for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) to determine barriers to pollution prevention and how to overcome them. It describes the design and use of a seventy-two page microcomputer based survey that examines barriers to pollution prevention and resulting data base and decision support system.     

A decision support system for environmental effects monitoring

The Environmental Effects Monitoring (EEM) Statistical Assessment Tool (SAT) Decision Support System (DSS) has been developed to provide a user-friendly data analysis, display and decision support tool for Canada's federal environmental effects monitoring program for the pulp and paper and mining industries. The target users include industries, consultants, regional EEM coordinators, National EEM Office and scientists involved in EEM-related research. The tool allows the assessment of the effects of effluent from industrial or other sources on fish and benthic populations. Effect endpoints, which are used as indicators of potentially important effluent effects, are measured at effluent-exposed sites and are compared statistically to measures at reference sites, in order to determine if changes have occurred and the magnitude of the changes. The main driver of the EEM-SAT DSS is its rule-based expert system. The results are used in assessing the adequacy of existing regulations for protecting aquatic environments.     

A decision support system for computer-aided process planning

A decision support system framework is presented to aid the Decision Maker to resolve conflicting, non-commensurate objectives to set up parameters for machining operations, using a Multiple Criteria Decision Making approach.