K-means method for rough classification of R&D employees' performance evaluation

This paper proposes an approach that can roughly cluster a data set with fuzzy linguistic entries as a prior data arrangement for performance evaluation of R&D employees. The extension principles of fuzzy linguistic numbers are used to modify the K‐means method for handling the linguistic data set. We define the absolute difference of fuzzy linguistic variables as their fuzzy distance. Based on this definition, the K‐means approach can be modified slightly for clustering purposes. The performance of employees engaged in designing and R&D‐oriented jobs is possibly related to some qualitative attributes and the evaluation of such attributes for each employee has a tendency toward semantic scales. In the proposed approach, the supervisor can evaluate the performance of each employee directly with a semantic scale. The modified K‐means approach can roughly cluster their performance into different classes in advance of applying some other sophisticated processes.     

A new evaluation model for intellectual capital based on computing with linguistic variable

In a knowledge era, intellectual capital has become a determinant resource for enterprise to retain and improve competitive advantage. Because the nature of intellectual capital is abstract, intangible, and difficult to measure, it becomes a challenge for business managers to evaluate intellectual capital performance effectively. Recently, several methods have been proposed to assist business managers in evaluating performance of intellectual capital. However, they also face information loss problems while the processes of subjective evaluation integration. Therefore, this paper proposes a suitable model for intellectual capital performance evaluation by combining 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic approach with multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) method. It is feasible to manipulate the processes of evaluation integration and avoid the information loss effectively. Based on the proposed model, its feasibility is demonstrated by the result of intellectual capital performance evaluation for a high-technology company in Taiwan.     

An integrated fuzzy synthetic evaluation approach for supplier selection based on analytic network process

In order to ensure the uninterrupted supply of items, the suppliers’ performance needs to be evaluated periodically. The evaluation process typically consists of identifying the attributes and criteria relevant to the decision, and measuring the performance of a supplier by considering the relevant criteria. But the evaluation process is complex. Linguistic assessment of suppliers may be carried out based on several criteria. Much of the data are difficult to obtain and ambiguous or vague to interpret. Nonetheless, a rational process of evaluation must exist to select the most appropriate suppliers. This paper develops a supplier evaluation approach based on the analytic network process (ANP) and fuzzy synthetic evaluation under a fuzzy environment. The importance weights of various criteria are considered as linguistic variables. These linguistic ratings can be expressed in triangular fuzzy numbers by using the fuzzy extent analysis. Fuzzy synthetic evaluation is used to select a supplier alternative and the Fuzzy ANP (FANP) method is applied to calculate the importance of the criteria weights. Then an integrated FANP and fuzzy synthetic evaluation methodology is proposed for evaluating and selecting the most suitable suppliers. A hypothetical example is presented and the results indicated that the combination of ANP and fuzzy synthetic evaluation provided useful tool to select the optimal supplier.     

Integrating hierarchical balanced scorecard with fuzzy linguistic for evaluating operating room performance in hospitals

Health care organizations are operating in a complex environment. The competitive and dynamic health care sector has spurred hospitals into delivering greater flexibility and quality of services. An efficient performance evaluation system is essential for controlling, monitoring and improving service quality in health care organizations. The performance evaluation of operating room (OR) is a useful work for managers to control the operational process of OR team so as to promote the performance. This paper explores the use of a management tool: balanced scorecard (BSC), which facilitates managers to meet multiple strategic goals, and fuzzy linguistic method for evaluating OR performance. BSC is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government and nonprofit organizations. First, a model is developed for measuring the acceptable performance of OR based on the interaction financial, customers, internal business process and learning and growth perspective. After that, BSC structure integrated with fuzzy linguistic is proposed for measuring and improving the service. The aim of this study was to build a performance evaluation system for OR and use a fuzzy linguistic to convert the subjective cognition of managers into an information entity and confirmation of improvement. This research results are able to help the organisation to evaluate and revise its strategy and generally to adopt modern management approaches in every day practise.     

模糊语言多属性群决策的客观综合赋权方法

针对一类属性及专家权重完全未知且评价值为直觉不确定语言数的多属性群决策问题,提出一种基于客观综合赋权模型的模糊群决策方法。通过定义直觉不确定语言数的不确定度和距离测度,对单个专家内部以及专家群体之间的评价值进行分析,分别建立基于离差最大化和熵值的属性综合赋权模型以及基于不确定度和偏离度的专家综合赋权模型,提出一种基于客观综合权重的直觉不确定语言多属性群决策方法。通过实例分析表明了该方法的可行性和实用性。     

A Fuzzy Collaborative Assessment Methodology for Partner Trust Evaluation

Trust level assessment within collaborative networks is an interesting issue in the partner evaluation and partner selection literature. This paper proposes a fuzzy collaborative assessment methodology for partner trust evaluation within horizontal collaborative networks. The proposed approach concerns a group evaluation context where a decision‐making comity associated with a manufacturer needs to evaluate its company's partners for their ranking purposes. Different expertise levels are attributed to the comity members. In this paper, trust level is evaluated based on information‐sharing attributes considered in the literature as critical influencing factors. Different weights are associated with these attributes with respect to their corresponding influence on trust. The semantic fuzzy partitioning method is considered for the collaborative trust assessment based on unbalanced linguistic term sets representing information‐sharing attributes. The developed approach is applied to a real case showing its effectiveness and its objectivity.     

A group decision support approach to evaluating journals

One of the most important decisions made in academic institutions, research organizations, and government agencies is the grading or ranking of journals for their academic values. Current methods for evaluating journals use either a subjective (e.g., experts’ judgments on journals) or objective approach (e.g., impact factors of journals), or an informal mix of the two. This paper presents a formal procedure that integrates objective and subjective judgments to provide a comprehensive method. The procedure is based on a fuzzy set approach that deals with the imprecise and missing information inherent in the evaluation process. The system was tested in Hong Kong in an assessment of faculty research productivity. Similar assessments exist in the UK, Singapore, and other countries. The proposed model can also be used for similar decisions that involve subjective and objective information.     

A group decision support approach to evaluating journals

One of the most important decisions made in academic institutions, research organizations, and government agencies is the grading or ranking of journals for their academic values. Current methods for evaluating journals use either a subjective (e.g., experts’ judgments on journals) or objective approach (e.g., impact factors of journals), or an informal mix of the two. This paper presents a formal procedure that integrates objective and subjective judgments to provide a comprehensive method. The procedure is based on a fuzzy set approach that deals with the imprecise and missing information inherent in the evaluation process. The system was tested in Hong Kong in an assessment of faculty research productivity. Similar assessments exist in the UK, Singapore, and other countries. The proposed model can also be used for similar decisions that involve subjective and objective information.     

Numerical and Linguistic Prediction of Time Series With the Use of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to time-series prediction realized both at the linguistic and numerical level. It exploits fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) along with a recently proposed learning method that takes advantage of real-coded genetic algorithms. FCMs are used for modeling and qualitative analysis of dynamic systems. Within the framework of FCMs, the systems are described by means of concepts and their mutual relationships. The proposed prediction method combines FCMs with granular, fuzzy-set-based model of inputs. One of their main advantages is an ability to carry out modeling and prediction at both numerical and linguistic levels. A comprehensive set of experiments has been carried out with two major goals in mind. One is to assess quality of the proposed architecture, the other to examine the influence of its parameters of the prediction technique on the quality of prediction. The obtained results, which are compared with other prediction techniques using fuzzy sets, demonstrate that the proposed architecture offers substantial accuracy expressed at both linguistic and numerical levels.     

Parting curve selection and evaluation using an extension of fuzzy MCDM approach

Parting curve selection and evaluation plays an important role in mold design. Multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) is an effective tool for evaluating and ranking problems involving multiple criteria. In order to select suitable parting curve, several criteria need to be taken into account. Therefore, this paper proposes an extension of fuzzy MCDM approach to solve parting curve selection problem. In the proposed model, the ratings of alternatives and importance weights of criteria for parting curve selection are expressed in linguistic terms. The membership functions of the final fuzzy evaluation value in the proposed model are developed based on the linguistic expressions. To make the procedure easier and more practical, the normalized weighted ratings are defuzzified into crisp values by using a new maximizing set and minimizing set ranking approach to determine the ranking order of alternatives. An example of parting curve evaluation and selection is given. The results show that the proposed approach is very effective in selecting the optimal parting curve for the molded part. Finally, this paper compares the proposed approach with another fuzzy MCDM approach to demonstrate its advantages and applicability.     

Selecting the advanced manufacturing technology using fuzzy multiple attributes group decision making with multiple fuzzy information

Selection of advanced manufacturing technology in manufacturing system management is very important to determining manufacturing system competitiveness. This research develops a fuzzy multiple attribute decision-making applied in the group decision-making to improving advanced manufacturing technology selection process. Since numerous attributes have been considered in evaluating the manufacturing technology suitability, most information available in this stage is subjective, imprecise and vague, fuzzy sets theory provides a mathematical framework for modeling imprecision and vagueness. In the proposed approach, a new fusion method of fuzzy information is developed to managing information assessed in different linguistic scales (multi-granularity linguistic term sets) and numerical scales. The flexible manufacturing system adopted in the Taiwanese bicycle industry is employed in this study to demonstrate the computational process of the proposed method. Finally, sensitivity analysis can be performed to examine that the solution robustness.     

Interval 2-tuple Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic MULTIMOORA method with CIA and their application to MCGDM

The reliable evaluation of financial performance of universities plays an important role in sustainable development of universities, and it could be regarded as a multicriteria group decision making problem. Based on this, in this paper, with respect to the attribute evaluation values are expressed by interval 2-tuple Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic variables, we develop an extended MULTIMOORA method. First, we propose the interval 2-tuple Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic set based on Pythagorean fuzzy set and interval-valued 2-tuple linguistic variables, and further introduce the score and accuracy functions and Hamming distance of it. Then, considering that there are some deficiencies in the traditional MULTIMOORA method, such as exist the case of circular reasoning, and so forth. We improve it by proposing a comprehensive integration approach, which can not only consider both the utility values and sort results, but also reflect the preference attitude of decision makings simultaneously. Based on these research findings, an interval 2-tuple Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic MULTIMOORA method is presented and the calculation process of this method is described in detail. Finally, we give the numerical example concerning the evaluation of financial management performance in universities to illustrate practicability and reliability of the proposed approach and compare the proposed method with different methods to perform its flexibility.     

Combining VIKOR with GRA techniques to evaluate service quality of airports under fuzzy environment

The aim of this paper was to present an effective approach for evaluating service quality of Northeast-Asian international airports by conducting customer surveys. In general, evaluation of service quality is a complex multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problem; therefore, a complex decision process is often involved in which multiple requirements and fuzzy conditions have to be taken into consideration simultaneously. By combining concepts of VIKOR and grey relational analysis (GRA), a new fuzzy MCDM method was proposed to deal with the evaluation of service quality problems in the international airports. This model was solved by an effective algorithm, which incorporated the decision-maker’s attitude and/or preference for customers’ assessments on weights and performance ratings of each criterion. An empirical study for evaluating service quality of seven major Northeast-Asian international airports was put forth to illustrate an application of the proposed model. The study results showed that this approach is an effective means for tackling MCDM problems involving subjective assessments of qualitative attributes in a fuzzy environment.     

A novel weight‐derived method and its application in graduate students' physical health assessment

In multiattribute decision making, the analytic network process (ANP) is an important methodology to derive the subjective weights of attributes when the dependence and feedback relations exist between attributes, and the number of attributes should be no more than seven in a comparison matrix. To reduce the dimensions of attributes, we propose a hybrid hesitant fuzzy linguistic factor analysis method to cluster the attributes into main factors. The method takes multiple forms of decision‐making information into consideration, such as single linguistic terms, hesitant fuzzy linguistic terms, and numeric values. Meanwhile, the objective weights of the main factors are obtained as well. As for the subjective weights of main factors, the incomplete probabilistic linguistic ANP is developed after improving the incomplete probabilistic linguistic preference relation with multiplicative consistency. At last, the final weights of the main factors are calculated by combining the objective and subjective weights. A questionnaire survey about assessing the weights of the main factors influencing graduate students' physical health is designed to explain the application of the proposed methodology. To sum up, the main importance and contributions of this study are as following: (1) developing a hybrid hesitant fuzzy linguistic factor analysis method and incomplete probabilistic linguistic ANP, (2) proposing a novel weight‐derived method from both objective and subjective perspectives, and (3) applying it to graduate students' physical health assessment.     

基于Rough集理论的模糊值属性信息表简化方法

为了有效地在信息表中处理取值为模糊术语的属性，解决Rough集对模糊值属性处理能力较弱的问题，提出了模糊不可分辨关系的概念，用于处理属性值为模糊术语的信息表．将约简、核、相对约简与相对核以及规则的约简与核等Rou曲集理论中一系列知识约简的概念推广到模糊环境下，提出了一种有效的模糊值信息表简化的启发式算法．数值实验验证该方法在模糊值属性信息表简化方面比传统的Pawlak方法和其他一些学者的相关工作更为有效．     

An interval-valued 2-tuple linguistic group decision-making model based on the Choquet integral operator

The Choquet integral (IL) operator is an effective approach for handling interdependence among decision attributes in complex decision-making problems. However, the fuzzy measures of attributes and attribute sets required by IL are difficult to achieve directly, which limits the application of IL. This paper proposes a new method for determining fuzzy measures of attributes by extending Marichal's concept of entropy for fuzzy measure. To well represent the assessment information, interval-valued 2-tuple linguistic context is utilised to represent information. Then, we propose a Choquet integral operator in an interval-valued 2-tuple linguistic environment, which can effectively handle the correlation between attributes. In addition, we apply these methods to solve multi-attribute group decision-making problems. The feasibility and validity of the proposed operator is demonstrated by comparisons with other models in illustrative example part.     

Technology credit scoring model with fuzzy logistic regression

Technology credit scoring models have been used to screen loan applicant firms based on their technology. Typically a logistic regression model is employed to relate the probability of a loan default of the firms with several evaluation attributes associated with technology. However, these attributes are evaluated in linguistic expressions represented by fuzzy number. Besides, the possibility of loan default can be described in verbal terms as well. To handle these fuzzy input and output data, we proposed a fuzzy credit scoring model that can be applied to predict the default possibility of loan for a firm that is approved based on its technology. The method of fuzzy logistic regression as an appropriate prediction approach for credit scoring with fuzzy input and output was presented in this study. The performance of the model is improved compared to that of typical logistic regression. This study is expected to contribute to practical utilization of the technology credit scoring with linguistic evaluation attributes.     

直觉模糊语言信息下的三维动态评价方法及应用

针对当前综合评价大多集中在静态评价以及属性权重未知的问题,在直觉模糊语言环境下提出一种三维动态评价方法.首先,利用模糊质量功能展开求解指标权重以弥补传统主客观确权方法的不足,体现指标越能表征顾客需求贡献度权重越大的赋权思路;其次,考虑到评价指标间的相互关系也会影响最终的评价结果,引入幂平均算子并将其扩展到直觉模糊语言集中,通过直觉模糊语言幂加权平均算子集结多属性信息得到静态综合评价值;接着,在静态评价值求解的基础上,基于全局信息定义分层激励因子和阶段信息定义成长因子分别对评价基础值的增长态势和增长趋势进行测度,构建基于评价基础值、变化状态与发展趋势的三维动态评价指数模型;最后以小微企业的信用评价为例验证所提出方法的有效性和可行性.     

一种基于对象-语言值决策矩阵的模糊语言TOPSIS决策方法

模糊语言决策方法是决策领域的热点研究内容之一.比较现有模糊语言决策方法研究中广泛使用的决策矩阵,提出对象-语言值决策矩阵表示决策专家根据决策属性给出的评价语言信息,分析对象-语言值决策矩阵在区分明晰、部分未知及犹豫的模糊语言决策问题中的优势;借鉴经典TOPSIS决策方法及向量运算,给出基于对象-语言值决策矩阵的正负理想解确定方法以及备选对象与正负理想解的伪距离和贴近度计算方法,分析伪距离和贴近度的相关性质;基于2-元组语言表示模型,提出基于对象-语言值决策矩阵的模糊语言TOPSIS决策方法.通过实例分析,并与已有3种重要的模糊语言决策方法进行比较,比较结果说明所提出的决策方法可以克服已有决策方法的不足, 是一种可选的模糊语言决策方法.     

基于GRA-GCRITIC和改进加权双向投影的区间Fermatean模糊多属性群决策方法

针对司法案件决策环境的复杂性及评价信息的模糊性,提出一种基于GRA-GCRITIC（grey relational analysis-group criteria importance through intercriteria correlation）和改进加权双向投影的区间Fermatean模糊Hamacher-TODIM多属性群决策方法。首先考虑到各位专家对各评价方案下各指标评价信息的差异性,提出一种GRA-GCRITIC方法,该方法将灰色关联融入到CRITIC中,以确定指标综合权重比单一获取的指标权重更加客观可靠。其次,结合信任关系对加权双向投影法进行改进,兼顾主客观关系,利用专家个体与群体评价信息的隶属度及非隶属度矩阵间的相似度得到专家权重。最后,考虑到决策者的损失规避心理,将融合了Hamacher算子的TODIM方法拓展至区间Fermatean模糊环境中,通过具体算例可得到其综合优势度及排序,验证了所提方法的可行性及灵活性。