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Multi-criteria methods represent an adequate tool for solving complex decision problems that provide real support to the decision maker in the choice process. This paper analyzes a decision problem that recurs over time using one of the newer methods as the Parsimonious AHP.

In this paper we integrated the P-AHP with: (1) the weighted average which takes into account the objectivity of the data; (2) ordered weighted average (OWA) aggregation operators that address the subjective nature of the data; (3) the Choquet integral and (4) the Sugeno integral which also considers the uncertain nature of the final ranking as it is defined on a fuzzy measure.

The present paper proves that variations in the final ranking, due to the different mathematical properties of the selected aggregators, are fundamental to select the best alternative without neglecting any characteristic of the input data. In fact, it is discussed and underlined how and why the best alternative is one that never excels but has very good positions with respect to all aggregation operator rankings.

The aim and innovation presented in this work is the use of the Parsimonious AHP (P-AHP) method in a dynamic way with the use of different aggregation techniques.

There is an increasing interest in the use of knowledge graphs to represent real-world knowledge and a common need to manage imprecise knowledge in many real-world applications. This paper aims to study approaches to solve flexible queries over knowledge graphs.

By introducing fuzzy logic in the query answering process, the authors are able to obtain a novel algorithm to solve flexible queries over knowledge graphs. This approach is implemented in the FUzzy Knowledge Graphs system, a software tool with an intuitive user-graphical interface.

This approach makes it possible to reuse semantic web standards (RDF, SPARQL and OWL 2) and builds a fuzzy layer on top of them. The application to a use case shows that the system can aggregate information in different ways by selecting different fusion operators and adapting to different user needs.

This approach is more general than similar previous works in the literature and provides a specific way to represent the flexible restrictions (using fuzzy OWL 2 datatypes).

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 study aims to find the best location for constructing green energy facilities in India and reducing CO₂ emissions. Incorporating green energy is a priority for many countries under the Paris Agreement. This task is challenging due to factors that affect implementation, and making the wrong decision wastes resources. India’s goals are net-zero emissions by 2070 and 50% renewable electricity by 2030. Other developing nations should emulate India’s renewable energy strategy. India ranks fourth in renewable energy and wind power, and fifth in solar power capacity. This research aims to identify the best locations in India for implementing green energy projects.

To identify the optimal green energy implementation sites in India, this research uses the hybrid multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) in an uncertain environment. This research uses the Delphi method to identify the most suitable green energy implementation sites in India. It adapts the elements for this investigation. In addition, the utilization of the Fermatean fuzzy weighted aggregated sum product assessment technique is implemented to effectively prioritize the factors that impact the selection of these sites. This study used the MEREC method (method based on the removal effects of criteria) to identify the most suitable areas in India for implementing green energy. The highest accuracy is attained through the amalgamation of these hybrid methods.

Following the computation data by hybrid MCDA in uncertainty environment, NP Kunta in Andhra Pradesh emerges as the recommended green energy site among the 11 considered. Also among the factors political strategies and objectives hold the highest priority among them.

This study is pioneering in its efforts to provide a comprehensive perspective on the development and management of green energy operations in India. The study proves advantageous for diverse sites in the successful adoption and management of green energy. The study is additionally valuable in informing policy development aimed at promoting the use of green energy by employees through the utilization of MCDA methods in uncertain environments.

The main goal of this paper is to develop novel Tω(weakest t-norm)-based fuzzy arithmetic operations to analyze the intuitionistic fuzzy reliability of Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) using fault tree.

The paper proposes a fuzzy fault tree analysis (FFTA) method for evaluating the intuitionistic fuzzy reliability of any nonrepairable system with uncertain information about failures of system components. This method uses a fault tree for modeling the failure phenomenon of the system, triangular intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (TIFNs) to determine data uncertainty, while novel arithmetic operations are adopted to determine the intuitionistic fuzzy reliability of a system under consideration. The proposed arithmetic operations employ Tω(weakest t-norm) to minimize the accumulating phenomenon of fuzziness, whereas the weighted arithmetic mean is employed to determine the membership as well as nonmembership degrees of the intuitionistic fuzzy failure possibility of the nonrepairable system. The usefulness of the proposed method has been illustrated by inspecting the intuitionistic fuzzy failure possibility of the PCBA and comparing the results with five other existing FFTA methods.

The results show that the proposed FFTA method effectively reduces the accumulating phenomenon of fuzziness and provides optimized degrees of membership and nonmembership for computed intuitionistic fuzzy reliability of a nonrepairable system.

The paper introduces Tω(weakest t-norm) and weighted arithmetic mean based operations for evaluating the intuitionistic fuzzy failure possibility of any nonrepairable system in an uncertain environment using a fault tree.

This paper aims to enable the analysts of reliability and safety system to assess the criticality and prioritize failure modes perfectly to prefer actions for controlling the risks of undesirable scenarios.

To resolve the challenge of uncertainty and ambiguous related to the parameters, frequency, non-detection and severity considered in the traditional approach failure mode effect and criticality analysis (FMECA) for risk evaluation, the authors used fuzzy logic where these parameters are shown as members of a fuzzy set, which fuzzified by using appropriate membership functions. The adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system process is suggested as a dynamic, intelligently chosen model to ameliorate and validate the results obtained by the fuzzy inference system and effectively predict the criticality evaluation of failure modes. A new hybrid model is proposed that combines the grey relational approach and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to improve the exploitation of the FMECA conventional method.

This research project aims to reflect the real case study of the gas turbine system. Using this analysis allows evaluating the criticality effectively and provides an alternate prioritizing to that obtained by the conventional method. The obtained results show that the integration of two multi-criteria decision methods and incorporating their results enable to instill confidence in decision-makers regarding the criticality prioritizations of failure modes and the shortcoming concerning the lack of established rules of inference system which necessitate a lot of experience and shows the weightage or importance to the three parameters severity, detection and frequency, which are considered to have equal importance in the traditional method.

This paper is providing encouraging results regarding the risk evaluation and prioritizing failures mode and decision-makers guidance to refine the relevance of decision-making to reduce the probability of occurrence and the severity of the undesirable scenarios with handling different forms of ambiguity, uncertainty and divergent judgments of experts.

User feedback inferred from the user's search-time behavior could improve the learning to rank (L2R) algorithms. Click models (CMs) present probabilistic frameworks for describing and predicting the user's clicks during search sessions. Most of these CMs are based on common assumptions such as Attractiveness, Examination and User Satisfaction. CMs usually consider the Attractiveness and Examination as pre- and post-estimators of the actual relevance. They also assume that User Satisfaction is a function of the actual relevance. This paper extends the authors' previous work by building a reinforcement learning (RL) model to predict the relevance. The Attractiveness, Examination and User Satisfaction are estimated using a limited number of the features of the utilized benchmark data set and then they are incorporated in the construction of an RL agent. The proposed RL model learns to predict the relevance label of documents with respect to a given query more effectively than the baseline RL models for those data sets.

In this paper, User Satisfaction is used as an indication of the relevance level of a query to a document. User Satisfaction itself is estimated through Attractiveness and Examination, and in turn, Attractiveness and Examination are calculated by the random forest algorithm. In this process, only a small subset of top information retrieval (IR) features are used, which are selected based on their mean average precision and normalized discounted cumulative gain values. Based on the authors' observations, the multiplication of the Attractiveness and Examination values of a given query–document pair closely approximates the User Satisfaction and hence the relevance level. Besides, an RL model is designed in such a way that the current state of the RL agent is determined by discretization of the estimated Attractiveness and Examination values. In this way, each query–document pair would be mapped into a specific state based on its Attractiveness and Examination values. Then, based on the reward function, the RL agent would try to choose an action (relevance label) which maximizes the received reward in its current state. Using temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms, such as Q-learning and SARSA, the learning agent gradually learns to identify an appropriate relevance label in each state. The reward that is used in the RL agent is proportional to the difference between the User Satisfaction and the selected action.

Experimental results on MSLR-WEB10K and WCL2R benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm, named as SeaRank, outperforms baseline algorithms. Improvement is more noticeable in top-ranked results, which usually receive more attention from users.

This research provides a mapping from IR features to the CM features and thereafter utilizes these newly generated features to build an RL model. This RL model is proposed with the definition of the states, actions and reward function. By applying TD learning algorithms, such as the Q-learning and SARSA, within several learning episodes, the RL agent would be able to learn how to choose the most appropriate relevance label for a given pair of query–document.

The present study aims to provide a practical and robust assessment technique for assessing countries' investability in global supply chains to practitioners. Thus, the proposed approach can help decision-makers evaluate and select appropriate countries in the expansion process of the global supply chains and reduce risks concerning country (market) selection.

The present study proposes a novel decision-making approach, namely the REF-Sort technique. The proposed approach has many valuable contributions to the literature. First, it has an efficient basic algorithm and can be applied to solve highly complicated decision-making problems without requiring advanced mathematical knowledge. Besides, some characteristics differentiate REF-Sort apart from other techniques. REF-Sort employs the value or value range that reflects the most typical characteristic of the relevant class in assignment processes. The reference values in REF-Sort and center profiles are similar in this regard. On the other hand, class references can be defined as ranges in REF-Sort. Secondary values, called successors, can also be employed to assign a value to the appropriate class. REF-Sort can also determine the reference and successor values/ranges independently of the decision matrix. In addition, the proposed model is a maximally stable and consistent decision-making tool, as it is resistant to the rank reversal problem.

The current papers' findings indicate that countries have different features concerning investment. Hence, the current paper pointed out that only 22% of the 95 countries are investable, whereas 19% are risky. Thus, decision-makers should make detailed evaluations using robust, powerful, and practical decision-making tools to make more reasonable and logical decisions concerning country selection.

The current paper proposes a novel decision-making approach to evaluate. According to the authors' information, the proposed model has been applied to evaluate investable countries for the global supply chains for the first time.

As environmental protection and sustainable development become more widely recognized, greater emphasis has been placed on the significance of green supplier selection (GSS), which can support businesses both upstream and downstream in enhancing their environmental performance while preserving their strategic competitiveness. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a new framework to study GSS.

Firstly, this paper establishes a GSS evaluation criteria system including product competitiveness, green performance, quality of service and enterprise social responsibility. Secondly, based on the spherical fuzzy sets (SFSs), the Average Induction Ordered Weighted Averaging Operator-Criteria Importance Through Inter Criteria Correlation (AIOWA-CRITIC) method is used to determine the subjective and objective weights and the combination of weights are determined by game theory. In addition, the GSS framework is constructed by the Cumulative Prospect Theory-Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (CPT-TOPSIS) method. Finally, the validity and robustness of the framework is verified through sensitivity comparative and ablation analysis.

The results show that Y3 is the most promising green supplier in China. This study provides a feasible guidance for GSS, which is important for the greening process of the whole supply chain.

Under spherical fuzzy sets, AIOWA and CRITIC are used to determine weights of indicators. CPT and TOPSIS are combined to construct a decision model, considering the ambiguity and uncertainty of information and the risk attitudes of decision-makers.

This study aims to improve the reliability of emergency safety barriers by using the subjective safety analysis based on evidential reasoning theory in order to develop on a framework for optimizing the reliability of emergency safety barriers.

The emergency event tree analysis is combined with an interval type-2 fuzzy-set and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. In order to the quantitative data is not available, this study based on interval type2 fuzzy set theory, trapezoidal fuzzy numbers describe the expert's imprecise uncertainty about the fuzzy failure probability of emergency safety barriers related to the liquefied petroleum gas storage prevent. Fuzzy fault tree analysis and fuzzy ordered weighted average aggregation are used to address uncertainties in emergency safety barrier reliability assessment. In addition, a critical analysis and some corrective actions are suggested to identify weak points in emergency safety barriers. Therefore, a framework decisions are proposed to optimize and improve safety barrier reliability. Decision-making in this framework uses evidential reasoning theory to identify corrective actions that can optimize reliability based on subjective safety analysis.

A real case study of a liquefied petroleum gas storage in Algeria is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The results show that the proposed methodology provides the possibility to evaluate the values of the fuzzy failure probability of emergency safety barriers. In addition, the fuzzy failure probabilities using the fuzzy type-2 AHP method are the most reliable and accurate. As a result, the improved fault tree analysis can estimate uncertain expert opinion weights, identify and evaluate failure probability values for critical basic event. Therefore, suggestions for corrective measures to reduce the failure probability of the fire-fighting system are provided. The obtained results show that of the ten proposed corrective actions, the corrective action “use of periodic maintenance tests” prioritizes reliability, optimization and improvement of safety procedures.

This study helps to determine the safest and most reliable corrective measures to improve the reliability of safety barriers. In addition, it also helps to protect people inside and outside the company from all kinds of major industrial accidents. Among the limitations of this study is that the cost of corrective actions is not taken into account.

Our contribution is to propose an integrated approach that uses interval type-2 fuzzy sets and AHP method and emergency event tree analysis to handle uncertainty in the failure probability assessment of emergency safety barriers. In addition, the integration of fault tree analysis and fuzzy ordered averaging aggregation helps to improve the reliability of the fire-fighting system and optimize the corrective actions that can improve the safety practices in liquefied petroleum gas storage tanks.