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The main purpose of present study is to model the replacement policy under uncertainty for managerial application based on grey-reliability approach by considering the subjective views of quality control circle (QCC). The study objectively links the optimality between individual replacement and group replacement policies for determining the minimum operational costs. The integrated framework between QCC, replacement theory, grey set theory and supply chain management is presented to plan replacement actions under uncertainty.

The study proposes the concept of grey-reliability index and built a decision support model, which can deal with the imprecise information for determining the minimum operational costs to plan subsequent maintenance efforts.

The findings of the study establish the synergy between individual replacement and group replacement policies. The computations related to the numbers of failures, operational costs, reliability index and failure probabilities are presented under developed framework. An integrated framework to facilitate the managers in deciding the replacement policy based on operational time towards concerning replacement of assets that do not deteriorate, but fails suddenly over time is presented. The conceptual model is explained with a numerical procedure to illustrate the significance of the proposed approach.

A conceptual model under the framework of such items, whose failures cannot be corrected by repair actions, but can only be set by replacement is presented. The study provides an important knowledge based decision support framework for crafting a replacement model using grey set theory. The study captured subjective information to build decision model in the ambit of replacement.

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 purpose of this paper is to synthesize the review of the existing literature attached to the grey economic system theory and applications and aims to offer a comprehensive picture of the contribution brought by the researchers to this particular field. Also, the paper underlines the main research areas within the grey economic theory and applications and serves as an informative summary kit for future research works and research directions.

For appreciating the scientific progress made since the grey systems theory has been initiated to the present, with an accent on the literature dedicated to the economic field, a bibliometrics analysis has been conducted. The Perish or Publish software was used for extracting the needed data from Google Scholar for the entire period since the appearance of grey systems to now-a-days. In addition, an ISI Web of Science (WoS) search has been performed for extracting the grey economic papers. As the main focus is on the economic subject area of the grey systems, only the papers related to this field have been selected.

The total number of grey economic paper from both Google Scholar and ISI WoS database, the number of authors, some citation metrics, H-index, authors’ provenience country, papers’ language, etc., have been presented and analysed. Also, a list with the most cited papers in the grey economic relational analysis, grey economic prediction models and grey economic incidence is putted forward.

Through the bibliometric analysis on grey economic papers written over time, a qualitative analysis was performed on this field in order to underline the main research direction, to analyse what has been done in this field and to determine which can be the next research directions that can emerge from here.

The paper succeeds in enlarging the view regarding the usage of grey systems theory in the economic field, offering a suitable analysis on the considered areas. Even though bibliometrics analysis have been conducted on the grey systems theory field, a grey economic bibliometric analysis has not been done yet, to the authors’ knowledge. Therefore, a synthesized of the existing literature attached to the grey economic system theory and applications is presented in order to offer a more comprehensive picture of the contribution brought by the researchers to this particular field.

Grey modeling technique is an important element of grey system theory, and academic articles applied to agricultural science research have been published since 1985, proving the broad applicability and effectiveness of the technique from different aspects and providing a new means to solve agricultural science problems. The analysis of the connotation and trend of the application of grey modeling technique in agricultural science research contributes to the enrichment of grey technique and the development of agricultural science in multiple dimensions.

Based on the relevant literature selected from China National Knowledge Infrastructure, the Web of Science, SpiScholar and other databases in the past 37 years (1985–2021), this paper firstly applied the bibliometric method to quantitatively visualize and systematically analyze the trend of publication, productive author, productive institution, and highly cited literature. Then, the literature is combed by the application of different grey modeling techniques in agricultural science research, and the literature research progress is systematically analyzed.

The results show that grey model technology has broad prospects in the field of agricultural science research. Agricultural universities and research institutes are the main research forces in the application of grey model technology in agricultural science research, and have certain inheritance. The application of grey model technology in agricultural science research has wide applicability and precise practicability.

By analyzing and summarizing the application trend of grey model technology in agricultural science research, the research hotspot, research frontier and valuable research directions of grey model technology in agricultural science research can be more clearly grasped.

Although the applications of grey system theory have been prosperous in the engineering field, there are very few applications to the management field. We argue that this theory is worthy of promotion to the management field. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to demonstrate the application of grey relation analysis, one part of the grey system theory, by analyzing the topic of service quality and customer satisfaction. Customers of the auto repair industry were chosen to find out the grey relation order of Parasuraman et al.’s ten factors. Tries to prove whether or not service quality and customer satisfaction are two different constructs. Finally, tries to verify the relative importance of technical quality and functional quality on service quality and customer satisfaction. The following is an enumeration of the important conclusions: each quality factor has a different effect upon service quality; each quality factor has a different effect upon customer satisfaction; service quality and customer satisfaction are different constructs in the minds of the consumers; technical quality and functional quality are of equal importance to service quality and customer satisfaction.

In this paper, we take a look at the state‐of‐the‐art of the theory and applications of the so‐called grey systems theory founded in the 1980s. After a brief historical review of the development history of this theory, we look at the main blocks of the theory followed by several successful applications. It is our hope that a reader who does not know anything about this branch of scientific exploration will gain a firm understanding of the basics so that the rest of this special issue becomes possible to comprehend.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the different types of grey information, explain the mechanism of grey system modeling and reconstruct the framework of grey system theory (GST).

GST has been developed for more than three decades; however, the framework of GST is still in an evolutionary process. This manuscript first explains grey information in detail, and then summarizes a series of grey system models under limited data and poor information. Figures and general steps for different types of grey system models are provided in this paper.

The findings in this paper clearly differentiate between grey information and other uncertainty information. The differences between grey system models and other uncertainty models are clearly explained. In addition, general steps for different grey system models are given which demonstrate the orientation of grey system modeling.

Theoretical framework is very important for developing a new theory. This paper clarified grey information and grey system-based modeling mechanism. It is very useful to understand and explain the systematic framework of GST and it contributes undoubtedly to make GST perfect.

Grey information is explained in terms of limited data and two types of grey numbers. Accordingly, all of the grey system models were divided into limited data-based grey system models and grey number-based grey system models.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a grey linear control system for regulating the price of China's real estate and provide the necessary support to assist the relevant management departments with their policy making.

A grey state equation of the real estate market price that can reflect both the market supply‐demand price mechanism and the production price mechanism is proposed based on the economic cybernetics. Also, the grey control linear theory is used to demonstrate the disequilibrium fluctuation control system for the China's real estate market with uncertain parameters.

The price disequilibrium fluctuation control system for China's real estate market has been in a critical state. The system would reach a balanced state in 2013, if the real estate price in 2010 and 2011 firstly decreased 244.41 yuan/m2 and 62.33 yuan/m2, respectively, and then increased 60.88 yuan/m2 in 2012. The disequilibrium state will continue for years before it reaches a balanced state.

Due to the complexity of operation of grey numbers, the present technique still cannot analyze the properties of the grey control system exactly and further research is needed.

The modelled results can help the relevant management departments steady China's real estate market by price regulation.

A new approach to study the price regulation system of a real estate market is proposed based on grey linear control theory.

Decision making is the task of selecting the most appropriate alternative among a finite set of possible alternatives with respect to some attributes. The attributes may be subjective or objective (or combination of both), depending upon the situation; requirements may also be conflicting. In practice, most of the real-world decision-making problems are based on subjective evaluation criteria which are basically ill-defined and vague. Since subjective human judgment bears ambiguity and vagueness in the decision making; application of grey numbers set theory may be proved fruitful in this context. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Owing to the advantages of grey numbers set theory in tackling subjectivity in decision making; the crisp-TODIM needs to be extended by integrating with grey numbers set theory in order to facilitate decision making consisting of subjective data. Hence, the unified objective of this paper is to propose a grey-based TODIM approach in the context of decision making.

Application potential of grey-TODIM has been demonstrated through a case empirical robot selection problem. Result obtained thereof, has also been compared to that of existing grey-based decision support systems available in literature.

Application potential of grey-based decision support systems (grey-TOPSIS, grey analysis, grey-MOORA) have been highlighted in available literature resource. However, the shortcoming of these approaches is that they do not consider decision-makers’ risk attitude while decision making. TODIM method is derived from the philosophy of Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) which considers risk averting attitude of the decision maker in case of gain and risk seeking attitude in case of loss, while comparing dominance between two alternatives with respect to a particular criterion. Hence, this paper contributes a mathematical foundation of TODIM coupled with grey numbers set theory for logical decision making.

We attempt to construct a grey three-way conflict analysis model with constraints to deal with correlated conflict problems with uncertain information.

In order to address these correlated conflict problems with uncertain information, considering the interactive influence and mutual restraints among agents and portraying their attitudes toward the conflict issues, we utilize grey numbers and three-way decisions to propose a grey three-way conflict analysis model with constraints. Firstly, based on the collected information, we introduced grey theory, calculated the degree of conflict between agents and then analyzed the conflict alliance based on the three-way decision theory. Finally, we designed a feedback mechanism to identify key agents and key conflict issues. A case verifies the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed model.

The results show that the proposed model can portray their attitudes toward conflict issues and effectively extract conflict-related information.

By employing this approach, we can provide the answers to Deja’s fundamental questions regarding Pawlak’s conflict analysis: “what are the underlying causes of conflict?” and “how can a viable consensus strategy be identified?”