The purpose of this research is to identify effective criteria for measuring competitive position of certain products of Shahdiran company, a regional major food and juice producer in Iran. To determine the criteria and their relative importance, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used by organizing a decision team consisting of 6 top managers of the company. Four major competitors (based on market share) were selected for comparison purposes. Cook and Seiford’s developed model which consists of 19 successive steps was used to determine the company’s competitive position. For that, questionnaires based on Saaty scale, were designed to determine; effective criteria, relative importance of each criterion, and company’s rank from retailer’s point of view.A survey research was also conducted to identify the position of other food product retailers in Mashhad as competitors. As a result, company's position in comparison with its four major competitors was determined through using 20 known criteria and market mix. The research further revealed that Alpha totally holds the first rank among its nearest competitors in the regional market while it holds rank 1 for product, 3 for price, 1 for place and finally the second rank for promotion.

Interval type-2 fuzzy sets, each of which is characterized by the footprint of uncertainty, are a very useful means to depict the linguistic information in the process of decision making. In this article, we investigate the group decision making problems in which all the linguistic information provided by the decision makers is expressed as interval type-2 fuzzy decision matrices where each of the elements is characterized by interval type-2 fuzzy set, and the information about attribute weights is completely unknown. We first introduce the average centroid matrix of the interval type-2 fuzzy decision matrix, and then utilize the interval type-2 fuzzy averaging operator to aggregate all individual interval type-2 fuzzy decision matrices into a collective interval type-2 fuzzy decision matrix. Based on the average centroid matrix of the collective interval type-2 fuzzy decision matrix and information theory, we develop an optimization model by which a straightforward formula for deriving attribute weights can be obtained. Furthermore, based on the interval type-2 fuzzy averaging operator, we utilize the average centroid measure to give an approach to ranking the given alternatives and then selecting the most desirable one(s). Finally, we give an illustrative example.

Water resources are among basics for sustainable development. The non uniform temporal and spatial distribution of water resources is led to shortage water in arid and semi arid regions. The inter basin water transfer projects are one remedy to this problem. According to the diversity of the feasible water transfer projects, ranking of the projects with different criteria is currently one of the important issues in water resources management. Fuzzy Multiple Criteria decision making (FMADM) is a collection of methodologies which can be used to compare, select, or rank Multiple alternatives that typically involve incommensurate attributes. The aim of this research was to use some of the fuzzy Multiple attribute group decision making methods for ranking some inter-basin water transfer projects of Karoon River, western Iran. Maximizing and minimizing sets method, the Bonissone’s method for group decision making, Fuzzy TOPSIS for group decision making, and Fuzzy decision making software were used in this study. A set of 10 interbasin water transfer projects with 8 criteria were considered. First, the weight of each criterion was determined within a group of five water resources experts, Then the rating preference for each alternative were obtained by the same group of experts. Finally, the results of different methods were compared. The results showed that the Tunnel Koohrang 1 posses the higher rank. Also, the Spearman rank correlation coefficient was obtained between different methods. The results showed that the Fuzzy TOPSIS and Bonissone method provide the best correlation. For evaluating the criteria weightings, the sensitivity analysis was conducted and the results were compared.

Dealing with Water Scarcity is one of the important problems in water resources management. There is no one of financial capability to execute all the water resources projects in one lot, so it is important to rank execution projects. In this study, one of the fuzzy Multiple attribute decision making methods was employed for ranking some of the inter-basin water transfer projects, by using different criteria and modifying the Raj and Kumar method for both benefit and cost criteria conditions. The approach has been applied to the Karun river basin. For ranking alternatives, first criteria and their weight were determined and then 10 inter-basin water resources projects of Karun river with 8 criteria were considered. The weight of each criterion determined by 5 water resources experts. The fuzzy weights of alternatives are computed by using standard fuzzy arithmetic. The concept of maximizing and minimizing sets is used to compute the total utility of each of alternatives. Finally, the results of maximizing and minimizing method were compared to FDM software.

The shortage of woody raw materials, derives the future development of national cellulosic industries on using non-wood lignocelluloses material such as bagasse. Therefore, the choice of relevant technology for the later has to he based on a logical and comprehensive model.To that end, criteria for future cellulose industry were developed and thier velatine weight were determined having three options and 17 criteria, decision making matrix was constructed and required inputs were developed during the study. In the next step, based on the quantitative and qualitative criteria, the three option were prioritized. The results reveal they the TOPSIS Model in a stage wised state indicated that the printing paper industry, M.D.F. and particleboard industries are respectively the first, second and the third priorities.

Multiple attribute decision making (MADM) methods are very much essential in all fields of engineering, management and other areas where limited alternatives exist and the decision maker has to select the best alternative. Different methods are available in the literature to tackle the MADM problems. The MADM problems are classified as scoring methods, compromising methods and concordance methods. The concordance methods are difficult to understand compared to scoring and compromising methods. Present work introduces a simple-to-understand and easy-to-convince method for Multiple attribute decision making problems. This method is based on the philosophy of both scoring and comprising methods and relies on the loss for not choosing the ideal best alternative. Different loss functions such as linear, quadratic and cubic functions have been proposed to calculate the loss. Example problems have been taken from the literature and the proposed method is implemented. Besides the simplicity of the proposed method, the results obtained are found to be in close agreement with rather difficult methods.

In this paper, we investigate the Multiple attribute decision making (MADM) problem based on the arithmetic and geometric aggregation operators with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. Then, motivated by the idea of traditional arithmetic operation, we have developed some aggregation operators for aggregating hesitant fuzzy linguistic information: hesitant fuzzy linguistic weighted average (HFLWA) operator, hesitant fuzzy linguistic ordered weighted average (HFLOWA) operator and hesitant fuzzy linguistic hybrid average (HFLHA) operator. Furthermore, we propose the concept of the dual hesitant fuzzy linguistic set and develop some aggregation operators with dual hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. Then, we have utilized these operators to develop some approaches to solve the hesitant fuzzy linguistic Multiple attribute decision making problems. Finally, a practical example is given to verify the developed approach and to demonstrate its practicality and effectiveness.

Background: During recent years, the cost of hospital services is increased in most countries and in spite of greater volume of resources devoted to hospitals, the ineffective management of hospitals has led to wasting of resources, hence, the measurement of hospitals efficiency or comparing between the input and output in such organizations is of special importance. Objective: Comparing between two methods, Ratio analysis and Multiple-attribute decision making model (MADM) to estimate the hospital efficiency. Methods: This was a descriptive analytical study carried out in 1998. The efficiency of 5 general hospitals affiliated to social security organization in Tehran province was compared using two methods named as “Ratio” and “MADM”. Findings: The results of this study showed that all hospital under investigation were facing problem with proper use of their inputs (beds) from a scale efficiency point of view.  Regarding the technical efficiency, 3 out of 5 hospitals were involved in shortage of personnel. Conclusion: Our data shows that, the Ratio method, due to some limitations in simultaneous use of quality and quantitative criteria, is incapable to measure hospital efficiency and providing a final conclusion by which the establishment of a ranking system to compare hospital efficiency could be made.