Critical Characteristics of Metasystems: Toward Defining Metasystems' Governance Mechanism

To effectively design, integrate, and understand the functional operations of metasystems, researchers and practitioners need a standard definition and common understanding of metasystems as an extended system-of-systems.     

An integrated approach to project evaluation and selection

Effective project evaluation necessitates incorporating the many conflicting objectives of decision maker(s) into decision models. Among the many proposed methodologies of multicriteria decision making, goal programming is perhaps the most popular and widely used. Although it incorporates multiple objectives and arrives at an optimal solution, its major drawback is that the decision maker(s) must specify goals and priorities a priori. To overcome this problem the Delphi method is suggested to be applied prior to goal programming formulation so that the objectives and their corresponding aspiration levels can be identified. Another drawback of goal programming is that it does not provide a systematic approach to set priorities and trade-offs among objectives. For this purpose an analytical hierarchy process is used. The application of the proposed methodology is then discussed and illustrated through an example     

The Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process to Determine Proportionality Constant of the Taguchi Quality Loss Function

Taguchi's philosophy of quality improvement is quite unique and challenging. Traditionally, quality management focused on conformance to specifications within a given range. In Taguchi's philosophy, the aim of quality management should be achieving a specific target value. Any deviation from the predetermined target value results in a loss (e.g., due to customer dissatisfaction). Taguchi measures this loss with a quadratic function called quality loss function (QLF). An important component of QLF is the proportionality constant ( ). An inaccurate or erroneous value for can result in misallocation of the organizational resources and can easily lead to chaos in quality management efforts. Thus, an accurate estimate for is of utmost importance. This paper proposes a new methodology for calculating the proportionality constant . To this end, the analytical hierarchy process is used to estimate the value of the proportionality constant in QLF. It is argued that the proposed methodology takes into account the relative importance of various quality characteristics and captures different levels of sensitivity along the loss function. Both symmetric and asymmetric loss functions are considered.