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The main motive behind framing this paper is to provide a compromised solution for trapezoidal fuzzy number–multi-objective fully quadratic fractional optimisation model (TrFN-MOFQFOM) by avoiding ambiguities and confusion of decision-makers (DMs). Many researchers have used Taylor's series and parametric approach to transform fractional objective function into non-fractional ones, but Taylor's series expansion is valid only up to a neighbourhood. To avoid these extra efforts, this article suggests a methodology in which numerator of objective function is optimised under the condition of optimising denominator.

This paper suggests an efficient procedure to search for compromised solution of MOFQFOM with fuzzy coefficients using α-level set and FGP approach. Incomplete data in model is dealt with α-level set. Then after defuzzification, non-fractional models are built from fractional model to get optimal solution of every objective. Finally, the linear weighted sum of negative deviational variables is minimised to satisfy all objective functions up to maximum possible extent.

On applying suggested approach to the example given in end, the authors arrived at compromised solution having μO1(O1(x))=1 and μO2(O2(x))=0.71. The applied procedure requires less computational efforts and provides the preferred compromised solution.

This work has not been done previously by anyone. The idea being developed here of constructing non-fractional model by dealing numerators and denominators separately is completely new. 10; In the end, an algorithm, flowchart and numerical are also given to clarify the applicability of the suggested approach.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the acceptance of mobile advertising by consumers in public service institutions in Lagos Nigeria from the perspective of non-permission-based nature of advertising practice in Nigeria.

Guided by the theory of reasoned action, data were collected from 389 respondents in a sample survey using a structured questionnaire, and the variables were measured on ordinal scale.

The respondents reported that the mobile advertising is informative; they also strongly agreed that the media is ubiquitous but irritating. Attitude of consumers towards mobile advertising, behavioural control and subjective norm have correlations with acceptance. Irritation and informativeness significantly and positively predicted acceptance of mobile advertising, while credibility and ubiquity predicted acceptance of the technology negatively. Age has a negative relationship with acceptance; both gender (male =1) and tertiary education have a significant relationship with acceptance of mobile advertising just as marital status.

The study focused only on public service mobile consumers in Lagos, Nigeria.

Mobile adverts are ubiquitous in Nigeria, but consumers do not trust or use the adverts, although they consider them informative. The telecomm regulatory body needs to control deployment of mobile technologies for produce and service ads, so that ads will be subject to individual choices and discretion, and thereby reducing the ubiquity and increase the trust consumers have on the strategy.

There is hype that mobile advert has penetrated Nigerian market, but the strategy is not credulous to the people.

There is no study focusing on the acceptance of this ad strategy in the public service sector in Nigeria.

Every day, the sun provides by far more energy than the amount necessary to meet the whole world’s energy demand. Solar energy, unlike fossil fuels, does not suffer from depleting resource and also releases no greenhouse gas emissions when being used. Hence, using solar irradiance to produce electricity via photovoltaic (PV) systems has significant benefits which can lead to a sustainable and clean future. In this regard, the purpose of this study is first to assess the technical and economic viability of solar power generation sites in the capitals of the states of Canada. Then, a novel integrated technique is developed to prioritize all the alternatives.

In this study, ten provinces in Canada are evaluated for the construction of solar power plants. The new hybrid approach composed of data envelopment analysis (DEA), balanced scorecard (BSC) and game theory (GT) is implemented to rank the nominated locations from techno-economic-environmental efficiency aspects. The input data are obtained using HOMER software.

Applying the proposed hybrid approach, the order of high to low efficiency locations was found as Winnipeg, Victoria, Edmonton, Quebec, Halifax, St John’s, Ottawa, Regina, Charlottetown and Toronto. Construction of ten solar plants in the ten studied locations was assessed and it was ascertained that usage of solar energy in Winnipeg, Victoria and Edmonton would be economically and environmentally justified.

As to novelty, it should be clarified that the authors propose an effective hybrid method combining DEA, BSC and GT for prioritizing all available scenarios concerned with the construction of a solar power plant.

Main constraints for an assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) are cycle time/number of stations and task precedence relations. However, due to the technological and organizational limitations, several other restrictions can be encountered in real production systems. These restrictions are called as assignment restrictions and can be task assignment, station, resource and distance limitations. The purpose of the study is to evaluate the effects of these restrictions on ALBP using constraint programming (CP) model.

A novel CP model is proposed and compared to mixed-integer programming (MIP) as a benchmark. The objective is to minimize the cycle time for a given number of stations. The authors also provide explicit anthology of the assignment restriction effects on line efficiency, the solution quality and the computation time.

The proposed approach is verified with the literature test instances and a real-life problem from a furniture manufacturing company. Computational experiments show that, despite the fact that additional assignment restrictions are problematic in mathematical solutions, CP is a versatile exact solution alternative in modelling and the solution quality.

Assembly line is a popular manufacturing system in the making of standardized high volume products. The problem of assembly line balancing is a crucial challenge in these settings and consists of assigning tasks to the stations by optimizing one or more objectives. Type-2 AR-ALBP is a specific case with the objective function of minimizing the cycle time for a given number of stations. It further assumes assignment restrictions that can be confronted due to the technological limitations or the strategic decisions of the company management. This is especially encountered in rebalancing lines.

Several solution approaches such as mathematical modelling, heuristic and meta-heuristic are proposed to solve the ALBP in the literature. In this study, a new approach has been presented using CP. Efficient models are developed for Type-2 ALBP with several assignment restrictions. Previous studies have not considered the problem to the presented extent. Furthermore, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper is the first study that solves ALBP with assignment restrictions using CP.

The results are given of six‐component measurements made on a model of the “Dornier Wal” flying boat, with a plate to represent the surface of the water. Comparisons were made with the results obtained previously with similar measurements made on a machine fitted with floats.

A market share problem is considered which has only a limited amount of data available, often only assigned attributes, and no quantifiable objective—only a number of goals which may possibly be achieved. The technique of goal programming is employed which builds the situation into a model with an objective and permits solution of this model. The approach is then generalised to show that it is applicable to a variety of problems which arise in marketing and related areas.

The purpose of this paper is to determine which of the ten material properties of the Hashin progressive damage model significantly affect the maximum load-carrying ability of center-notched carbon fiber panels under in-plane tension and out-of-plane bending.

The approach used is to calculate the maximum load using a finite element model for a range of material property values as specified by a fraction factorial design. The finite element model used has been experimentally validated in prior work.

Results showed that for the laminates considered, at most three and as few as one of the ten Hashin material properties significantly affected the magnitude of the maximum load.

While the results of this paper only specifically apply to the laminates included in the study, the results suggest that, in general, only a small number of the Hashin material properties affect laminate load-carrying ability.

Knowing which properties are significant is of value in selecting materials to optimize performance and also in determining which properties need to be known to a high accuracy.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an alternative numerical approach for describing fractional diffusion in Cartesian and non‐Cartesian domains using a Monte Carlo random walk scheme. The resulting domain shifting scheme provides a numerical solution for multi‐dimensional steady state, source free diffusion problems with fluxes expressed in terms of Caputo fractional derivatives. This class of problems takes account of non‐locality in transport, expressed through parameters representing both the extent and direction of the non‐locality.

The method described here follows a similar approach to random walk methods previously developed for normal (local) diffusion. The key differences from standard methods are: first, the random shifting of the domain about the point of interest with, second, shift steps selected from non‐symmetric, power‐law tailed, Lévy probability distribution functions.

The domain shifting scheme is verified by comparing predictive solutions to known one‐dimensional and two‐dimensional analytical solutions for fractional diffusion problems. The scheme is also applied to a problem of fractional diffusion in a non‐Cartesian annulus domain. In contrast to the axisymmetric, steady state solution for normal diffusion, a non‐axisymmetric solution results.

This is the first random walk scheme to utilize the concept of allowing the domain to undergo the random walk about a point of interest. Domain shifting scheme solutions of fractional diffusion in non‐Cartesian domains provide an invaluable tool to direct the development of more sophisticated grid based finite element inspired fractional diffusion schemes.

This study reviews the methods found in the literature for the ranking of authors, identifies the pros and cons of these methods, discusses and compares these methods. The purpose of this paper is to study is to find the challenges and future directions of ranking of academic objects, especially authors, for future researchers.

This study reviews the methods found in the literature for the ranking of authors, classifies them into subcategories by studying and analyzing their way of achieving the objectives, discusses and compares them. The data sets used in the literature and the evaluation measures applicable in the domain are also presented.

The survey identifies the challenges involved in the field of ranking of authors and future directions.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first survey that studies the author ranking problem in detail and classifies them according to their key functionalities, features and way of achieving the objective according to the requirement of the problem.