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Starting from the ordinary (i.e., not model‐theoretic) model concept, the basic notions of the model‐reality relationship are discussed. In particular, the functional and behavioural equivalence is studied. It is argued that although analytically fertile, the distinction between functional and behavioural equivalence overlooks problems of crucial methodological importance. From a methodological stand‐point the knowledge hierarchy of B. Zeigler seems promising. However, Zeigler's approach contains some important ontological commitments which should be given due attention in the process of model building and model validation. Som remarks of model building in economics are used as illustrations for Zeigler's method and the limitations contained therein.

Describes a novel Internet auction model achieving verifiable fairness, a requirement aimed at enhancing the trust of bidders in auctioneers. Distrust in remote auctioneers prevents bidders from participating in Internet auctioning. According to proposed survey reports, this study presents four characteristics that render the Internet untrustworthy for bidders. These intrinsic properties suggest that auction sites not only follow auction policies, but provide customers with evidence validating that the policies are applied fairly. Evidence of verifiable fairness provides bidders with a basis for confidence in Internet auctions. Cryptographic techniques are also applied herein to establish a novel auction model with evidence to manifest and verify every step of the auctioneer. Analysis results demonstrate that the proposed model satisfies various requirements regarding fairness and privacy. Moreover, in the proposed model, the losing bids remain sealed.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model that relates the desire for justice with welfare.

The point of departure, elaborated in the first part of the paper, is the observation that we have no sense-organs for experiencing welfare and the experiences of happiness being, in general, transient if they emerge at all. Desires drive our behavior and motivate our decisions. The author will analyze conditions so that desires can be related to welfare, making use of results of social choice theory. There is some (technical) similarity between aggregating individual preferences and editing (“reconstruction”) desires.

In special cases, desires are well ordered and can be represented by preference orderings, ready for deriving “rational choices.” However, desires may be circular. Then, of course, the satisfaction of a particular desire will never trigger happiness because there is always a “higher valued” (or “more prominent”) desire unsatisfied. In these cases, desires and welfare cannot be matched. However, there are social desires, such as the desire for justice (as fairness), that can have welfare-enhancing consequences if satisfied even when private desires are circular, as desires for justice contain a social component.

This issue will be elaborated in the second part of the paper using a formal model, borrowed from Fehr and Schmidt (1999), in order to illustrate the underlying reasoning.

World-class total productive maintenance (TPM) status depends on critical success factors (CSF) to be properly implemented. The relevant literature has identified several CSF; however, researchers have not investigated the degree of importance of each phase of the process. The purpose of this paper is to prioritize the CSFs that influence TPM implementation during each phase of the process in order to aid decision making in companies.

The main CSF are identified from a literature review. This paper focusses on the judgments of managers who are experts in TPM implementation in companies which have received TPM awards for excellence. The judgments are processed using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. Three aggregation methods (geometric mean, Copeland and fuzzy) are employed for comparative analysis.

Although the literature highlights some important CSF, the relevance of these factors is not the same in each phase of TPM implementation. Analysis shows that ranking using the Copeland method is most coherent.

This research was carried out in some Brazilian companies.

If managers are aware of the CSF to be prioritized in each phase, this facilitates decision making, resulting in a more effective implementation of TPM.

If TPM implementation is effective, this stimulates the personnel involved and avoids the possibility of the program being abandoned.

The originality of this paper consists in the proposed model to prioritize CSF during each phase of the implementation of TPM.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the available literature on applications of the rough set theory. Concepts of the rough set theory are discussed for approximation, dependence and reduction of attributes, decision tables and decision rules. The applications of rough sets are discussed in pattern recognition, information processing, business and finance, industry, environment engineering, medical diagnosis and medical data analysis, system fault diagnosis and monitoring and intelligent control systems. Development trends and future efforts are outlined. An extensive list of references is also provided to encourage interested readers to pursue further investigations.

Over the years, several business process management maturity models (BPM-MMs) have been proposed. Despite great advances, some issues concerning the effectiveness of their practical functionality still need to be addressed. These are related to three important aspects of BPM maturity assessment and improvement: their mechanisms for evaluating maturity (clarity, availability and accuracy), their flexibility (compliance) and their structure (path to maturity). The main goal with this article is to address such issues by introducing a new concept to evaluate and improve BPM maturity.

The authors proceed in accordance with a design science research (DSR) integrating multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) with intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs).

The authors’ proposal provides a practical BPM maturity framework and its assessment procedure to support organizations to determine and improve their initiatives appropriately, which means that it fully or partially addresses all the issues raised. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework, a real application was conducted, and a parallel between existing BPM-MMs is presented to emphasize its advances.

It is the first time that the MCDM approach has been used to support BPM maturity assessment. This approach not only takes into account the uncertainties and subjectivities inherent to this type of decision problem but also allows it to be treated quantitatively, thus making it possible to obtain more accurate results even with less experienced teams.

The paper attempts to construct a novel multi-objective grey hierarchical group consensus approach to deal with the group consensus problems consisting of hierarchical relationship and non-cooperative behaviors among decision makers (DMs).

To deal with these group consensus problems consisting of hierarchical relationship and non-cooperative behaviors among DMs non-cooperative behavior in uncertain information systems, considering the influence of coordination cost and the degree of group consensus, based on the idea of grey situation decision-making, the authors establish a multi-objective grey hierarchical group consensus model, and design different invalid decision elimination rules for decision-making groups of different sizes, and use a case verifies the effectiveness and feasibility of the model.

With the continuous improvement of the coordination cost budget, the degree of consensus of all departments and the overall consensus tend to be stable, and will no longer change with the increase of the coordination cost budget. The cost required by each department is basically consistent with the response trend of the cost required to coordinate the overall situation to the pre-set lower limit of group consensus.

The proposed approach can succeed in identifying DMs' information, and mine the DMs' information and help make a relatively more scientific decision.

Complex cost structures and multiple conflicting objectives make selecting an appropriate cloud service difficult. The purpose of this study is to propose a novel group consensus decision making method for cloud services selection with knowledge deficit by trust functions.

This article proposes a knowledge deficit-based multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) method for cloud-service selection based on trust functions. Firstly, the concept of trust functions and a ranking method is developed to express the decision-making opinions. Secondly, a novel 3D normalized trust degree (NTD) is defined to measure the consensus levels. Thirdly, a knowledge deficit-based interactive consensus model is proposed for the inconsistent experts to modify their decision opinions. Finally, a real case study has been carried out to illustrate the framework and compare it with other methods.

The proposed method is practical and effective which is verified by the real case study. Knowledge deficit is an important concept in cloud service selection which is verified by the comparison of the proposed recommended mechanism based on KDD with the conventional recommended mechanism based on average value. A 3D NTD which considers three values (trust, not trust and knowledge deficit) is defined to measure the consensus levels. A knowledge deficit-based interactive consensus model is proposed to help decision-makers reach group consensus. The proposed group consensus model enables the inconsistent decision-makers to accept the revised opinions of those with less knowledge deficit, rather than accepting the recommended opinions averagely.

The proposed a knowledge deficit-based MCGDM cloud service selection method considers group consensus in cloud service selection. The concept of knowledge deficit is considered in modeling the group consensus measuring and reaching method.

This article surveys the status and potential of three small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in relation to the concept of the corporate university. It examines the dynamic context for their current training and development activities and their individual similarities and differences in emphasis and priorities. The study involves the use of taxonomies and model structures to articulate current status and to give pointers to further potential for corporate university or corporate academy development.

The consensus opinion helps with the achievement of fairness of the decision process, especially when the new decision makers (DMs) are added into the group decision making (GDM). This paper aims to show by constructing consensus models that when some conditions are met, the consensus level does not decrease even when new DMs are invited to join the GDM (new opinions are added to the GDM).

This paper first constructs a deviation which is the difference between each two individual opinions. The smaller these differences are, the higher consensus degree (level) of the group. Then, a consensus optimization model based on individual differences (IDCO) is constructed by minimizing the aggregated deviations. Lastly, based on the optimization model, the condition of reaching a high level of consensus when new DMs are added into the GDM is discussed.

The discussion on the properties of the IDCO indicates that once the consensus with all DMs reaching an acceptable level, the consensus deviation degree decreases as the number of DMs increases when certain conditions are met, and the consensus level does not decrease even when new DMs join the GDM.

Practically, high-level consensus needs to be reached no matter how difficult it is when the new opinions are added into the GDM. To see how this end could be achieved, this paper takes the fuzzy preference relations as particular instances to investigate the conditions of consensus under which new DMs (opinions) are added into the GDM. The rather holistic analysis leads us to such a conclusion that the authors can replace this particular kind of preference, as used in the discussion, in many other cases by, for instance, multiplicative preference relation, linguistic preference relation, etc.