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The purpose of this paper is to review systematically the research of grey relation analysis (GRA) models.

Three different approaches, the springboard to build a GRA model, the angle of view in modelling, and the dimension of objects, are analysed, respectively.

The GRA models developed from the models based on relation coefficients of each point in the sequences in early days to the generalized GRA models based on integral or overall perspective. It evolved from the GRA models which measure similarity based on nearness, into the models which consider similarity and nearness, respectively. The objects of the research advanced from the analysis of relationship among curves to that among curved surfaces, and further to the analysis of relationship in three‐dimensional space and even the relationship among super surfaces in n‐dimensional space.

The further research on GRA models is proposed. One is about the property of GRA model. An in‐depth knowledge about the properties of GRA model will help people to understand its function, applicable area and requirements for modelling. The other one is about the extension of research object system. The object to be analysed should be extended from the common sequence of real numbers to grey numbers, vectors, matrices, and even multi‐dimensional matrices, etc.

Structural factors during Chinese and Japanese immigration and settlement processes required families to adapt in ways that altered traditional gender behaviors. This study examines how two factors – spousal immigration order and family economic structure – affected the gendered division of labor and how gender roles consequently were reconstructed for first and second generation Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans. These issues are investigated through secondary data analysis of 21 in‐depth interviews with daughters of Chinese and Japanese immigrants on the West Coast.

Since the demand for energy has dramatically increased in the countries which have fast-growing population and economy, they have faced with a critical problem of how to evaluate a set of potential energy sources (i.e. nuclear, natural gas, bio, geothermal, hydro, wind and solar) and choose the ultimate energy source for their needs. On the other hand, this critical problem turns into a multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) in the presence of a set of energy source alternatives and evaluation criteria. In literature, there are many MCDM methods introduced to solve for different kinds of problems. The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated approach for evaluating energy sources using fuzzy AHP and GRA, with a case for Turkey.

In this paper, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and grey relational analysis (GRA) methods are used because of their advantages for similar problems. On the other hand, due to the fact that the conventional AHP by a nine-point scale and GRA method using a scale with crisp values can be unable to handle to capture the right judgments of a decision-maker(s), to reflect the vagueness and uncertainty on the judgments of a decision-maker, the fuzzy logic is integrated with the AHP and GRA.

The contributions of the paper to the literature are given in two dimensions as follows: it presents an integrated approach for complex decision processes with subjective data or vague information; the proposed approach, the fuzzy AHP-GRA method for energy source selection, is unique for the related problem in literature. The results of the proposed model from the case of Turkey will help practitioners and experts of how to apply it to the similar problems in the field of energy management.

In short, in this paper, an integrated approach is proposed through the fuzzy AHP and the fuzzy GRA methods. As the fuzzy AHP is used to determine the weights of evaluation criteria, the fuzzy GRA is used to rank energy source alternatives.

In addition, a case study for Turkey is presented to show the applicability of the proposed approach for potential practitioners who are authority in the field of energy in public and private sectors.

On the other hand, the proposed approach, the fuzzy AHP-GRA for energy source selection can also be an intelligent tool for public and private energy companies in Turkey, as well as others in the world.

On the other hand, in this paper, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study contributes to the literature that the first time, they use the fuzzy alpha-cut AHP and GRA in fuzzy environment for energy source evaluation problem.

As the grey systems theory has been widely used in the field of sustainable development (SD) research, in the following, a short literature overview will be put forward, starting from the usage of these theories in the economic development, social inclusion and environmental protection contributions to the evolving process of SD during 2011–2021. The purpose of this paper is to identify some key studies from all the SD areas in which the grey systems can be used in order to open and to bring the researchers to new domains in which they can reveal their interest and in which they can successfully use the methods offered by the grey systems theory.

Using the search engine offered by the Google Scholar and the Web of Science (WoS), a literature review has been performed for the grey systems applications on SD research on both grey relational analysis (GRA) and grey forecasting. In addition, some grey evaluation theories – clustering evaluation models and grey target decision models – have also been presented.

Many grey models are widely used in the field of SD. Compared with other methods such as grey prediction, grey evaluation and decision-making model, GRA technology is the most used method, and the research using this method is more than three times that of all other methods.

The present paper identifies some of the most representative examples in which the grey system theory (GST) has been used, but, in the same time, there are a lot of studies that have not been mentioned here due to the lack of space.

The present paper focuses on the SD applications in which GST has been successfully used, bringing to the reader a general overview on this field and, in the same time, enables new research perspectives.

The aim of this paper is to construct a performance evaluation of banks with the stock market taken into consideration.

Grey relation analysis (GRA), a concept borrowed from the study of industry and increasingly applied to commerce, is used to evaluate the relative performance of three major banks in Australia. The purpose of using GRA is to reduce the number of financial indicators by selecting representative indicators from financial statement analysis.

Benchmarking performance indicators are essentially finding the representative indicator from the existing ratios most commonly used in financial analysis to assess business operational performance. The paper compares the GRA results from the financial statement analyses and shows the same result can be obtained.

This paper conducted a review of literature and five‐power analysis to aggregate financial ratios appropriate for the analysis. This method may result in incompleteness in the aggregation of ratios, and requires adjustment when other issues for analysis are involved. Future research could set up a specific model for the preliminary selection of financial ratios with a new to make studies of this kind more complete.

This paper introduced a new approach for performance evaluation – GRA. The major contribution of this paper is the use of GRA methodology to retrieve ratios most commonly used in financial analysis to tackle the problems of sample size and distribution uncertainty. This could avoid the waste of resources due to the uncertainty of relations among the ratios when using them for analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the teaching performance of Turkish Business Schools (BSs). It also aims to determine the degree of importance of factors affecting the teaching performance of Turkish BSs. The final objective is to test the functionality and applicability of the model.

This study presents a ranking approach based on grey relational analysis (GRA). While evaluating the BSs, data were collected for 19 Turkish BSs in terms of five main criteria such as OSS score; Number of faculty members; Number of students per faculty member; the mean of KPSS score; and the standard deviation of KPSS score. In the analysis, three weighted methods were integrated into the GRA in order to weight the criteria.

According to this result, the main factor influencing the teaching performance of Turkish BSs is the OSS score. This study can also confirm that the results obtained from the ranking orders using the proposed methods are reliable and these results can help decision makers to identify the best alternative.

In order to provide benchmarking data more effectively, in future, it would be helpful to collect data from both foundation and state universities with a research focus. Moreover, as an interesting suggestion for future research, fuzzy environment may be further integrated into the framework of GRA.

In contrast to prior research, this study makes comparisons based on the scores of national exams instead of different bibliometric indicators. Furthermore, there are no studies which have used GRA and these weighted methods as combined in education sector.

In general, regular selection tools for reference materials do not provide adequate coverage for government documents and technical reports. The situation is improving in the case of government documents in recent times as the awareness of the importance of documents is growing. For example, Reference Services Review publishes surveys and special features on government documents. Libraries Unlimited publishes a biennial guide titled, Government Reference Books. In contrast, very little attention is paid to the technical reports literature and they remain unexploited by the average reference librarian.

Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to control activities on its territory, due to the rising need to find solutions for universal problems, like the pollution of the environment, on an international level. Globalisation is a complex, forceful legal and social process that take place within an integrated whole with out regard to geographical boundaries. Globalisation thus differs from international activities, which arise between and among States, and it differs from multinational activities that occur in more than one nation‐State. This does not mean that countries are not involved in the sociolegal dynamics that those transboundary process trigger. In a sense, the movements triggered by global processes promote greater economic interdependence among countries. Globalisation can be traced back to the depression preceding World War II and globalisation at that time included spreading of the capitalist economic system as a means of getting access to extended markets. The first step was to create sufficient export surplus to maintain full employment in the capitalist world and secondly establishing a globalized economy where the planet would be united in peace and wealth. The idea of interdependence among quite separate and distinct countries is a very important part of talks on globalisation and a significant side of today’s global political economy.

Presents over sixty abstracts summarising the 1999 Employment Research Unit annual conference held at the University of Cardiff. Explores the multiple impacts of globalization on work and employment in contemporary organizations. Covers the human resource management implications of organizational responses to globalization. Examines the theoretical, methodological, empirical and comparative issues pertaining to competitiveness and the management of human resources, the impact of organisational strategies and international production on the workplace, the organization of labour markets, human resource development, cultural change in organisations, trade union responses, and trans‐national corporations. Cites many case studies showing how globalization has brought a lot of opportunities together with much change both to the employee and the employer. Considers the threats to existing cultures, structures and systems.

In this paper, the four popular multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods in fuzzy environment are utilized to reflect the vagueness and uncertainty on the judgments of decision-makers (DMs), because the crisp pairwise comparison in these conventional MCDM methods seems to be insufficient and imprecise to capture the right judgments of DMs. Of these methods, as Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) is used to calculate criteria weights, the other methods; Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (F-TOPSIS), Fuzzy Grey relational analysis (F-GRA) and Fuzzy Preference Ranking Organization METhod for Enrichment of Evaluations (F- PROMETHEE II) are used to rank alternatives in the three different ways for a comparative study.

The demand for green products has dramatically increased because the importance and public awareness of the preservation of natural environment was taken into consideration much more in the last two decades. As a result of this, especially manufacturing companies have been forced to design more green products, resulting in a problem of how they incorporate environmental issues into their design and evaluate concept options. The need for the practical decision-making tools to address this problem is rapidly evolving since the problem turns into an MCDM problem in the presence of a set of green concept alternatives and criteria.

The incorporation of fuzzy set theory into these methods is discussed on a real-life case study, and a comparative analysis is done by using its numerical results in which the three fuzzy-based methods reveal the same outcomes (or rankings), while F-GRA requires less computational steps. Moreover, more detailed analyses on the numerical results of the case study are completed on the normalization methods, distance metrics, aggregation functions, defuzzification methods and other issues.

The designing and manufacturing environmental-friendly products in a product design process has been a vital issue for many companies which take care of reflecting environmental issues into their product design and meeting standards of recent green guidelines. These companies have utilized these guidelines by following special procedures at the design phase. Along the design process consisting of various steps, the environmental issues have been considered an important factor in the end-of-life of products since it can reduce the impact on the nature. In the stage of developing a new product with the aim of environmental-friendly design, the green thinking should be incorporated as early as possible in the process.

The case study was inspired from the previous work of the author, which was realized in a hot runner systems manufacturer, used in injection molding systems in a Canada. In a new product development process, the back- and front-ends of development efforts mainly determine the following criteria: cost, risk, quality and green used in this paper. The case study showed that the three fuzzy MCDM methods come to the same ranking outcomes. F-GRA has a better time complexity compared to the other two methods and uses a smaller number of computational steps. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the three F-MCDM methods; F-PROMETHEE II, F-TOPSIS and F-GRA used in ranking for green concept alternatives using the numerical results of the case study. For the case study; as seen in table 20, the three F-MCDM methods produced the numerical results on the rankings of the green concept alternatives as follows; {Concept A-Concept C–Concept B–Concept D}.

Inclusion of environmental-related criteria into concept selection problem has been gaining increasing importance in the last decade. Therefore, to facilitate necessary calculations in applying each method especially with its fuzzy extension, it can be developed a knowledge-based (KB) or an expert system (ES) to help the DMs make the required calculations of each method, and interpret its results with detailed analysis.

The objective of the research was to propose a F-AHP based F-MCDM approach to green concept selection problem through F-PROMETHEE II, F-TOPSIS and F-GRA methods. As the F-AHP is used to weight evaluation criteria, the other methods are respectively used for ranking the concept alternatives and determine the best concept alternative.