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Previous studies on hospital supply chain performance have attempted to measure the performance of the hospital supply chain either by the measurement of performance indicators or the performance of specific activities. This paper attempts to measure the internal hospital supply chain's performance indicators to find their interdependencies to understand the relationship among them and identify the key performance indicators for each of those aspects of the logistics process toward improvement.

In this research, a systematic assessment and analysis method under vagueness is proposed to assess, analyze and measure the internal health care performance aspects (HCPA). The proposed method combines the group Decision-Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method and rough set theory.

The study results indicate that the most critical aspects of hospital supply chain performance are completeness of treatment, clinical care process time and no delay in treatment.

The causal relationship from rough-DEMATEL can advise management officials that to improve the completeness of treatment toward patient safety, clinical care process time should be addressed initially and with it, patient safety aspects such as free from error, clinical care productivity, etc. should be improved as well. Improvement of these aspects will improve the other aspects they are related to.

Housing infrastructure is the basic need for people of a community and due to disaster many houses may severaly damaged. Stakeholders and decision makers should focus on this issue and make the infrastructure more resilient against natural hazards. As dependency plays a very important role in resilience, it is important to study the dependencies and correlations among the housing infrastructure resilience factors. The evaluation of dependencies involve vagueness due to subjective judgement of experts.

In this work, the interaction between the housing infrastructure resilience factors are evaluated by using two different approaches such as crisp DEMATEL (Decision-Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory) and rough DEMATEL (intregated crisp DEMATEL and rough set theory), where rough theory addressed the involvement of vagueness. These two approaches are compared with each other to find the effectiveness of rough DEMATEL over crisp DEMATEL.

The important factors of housing infrastructure resilience are identified by using both the approaches against flood hazard.

The limitation of rough DEMATEL method is that it does not differentiate the type of influence such as positive or negative.

The outcome of the work will helps the stakeholders and ecission makers to make the infrastructure more resilient.

This study identify the imporatnat resilience factors of housing infrastructure against flood hazard by using two methodologies.

This paper aims to identify and analyze the barriers to the implementation of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s programxk for export consortia in the Iranian handmade carpet industry.

To accomplish its objectives, the study relied on a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) research method. Primarily, unstructured interviews were conducted to identify the effective barriers. Then, the validity of the barriers identified was evaluated through content validity ratio analysis. Finally, the interrelationships between the barriers were determined using the rough decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory technique (DEMATEL).

Results revealed that “a lack of leadership,” “a traditional business environment” and “a lack of awareness of consortium benefits” were the most significant causal barriers. Meanwhile, the most important effect barriers were “a lack of long-term vision,” “a lack of business ethics” and “a lack of motivation.”

The findings and results could help the stakeholders of the handmade carpet industry in Iran to improve existing export consortium programs, increasing the country’s share in the global markets in this industry.

This investigation seeks to fill an existing gap in the literature on export consortium formation in the handmade carpet industry by providing a network of barriers for the first time.

Food supply chains (FSCs) are fast becoming more and more complex. Sustainability is a necessary strategy in FSCs to meet the environmental, economic and societal requirements. Industry 4.0 (I4.0) applications for a circular economy (CE) will play a significant role in sustainable food supply chains (SFSCs). I4.0 applications can be used in for traceability, tracking, inspection and quality monitoring, environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, farm input optimization, process automation, etc. to improve circularity and sustainability of FSCs. However, the factors integrating I4.0 and CE adoption in SFSC are not yet very well understood. Furthermore, despite such high potential I4.0 adoption is also met with several barriers. The present study identifies and analyzes twelve barriers for the adoption of I4.0 in SFSC from an CE context.

A cause-effect analysis and prominence ranking of the barriers are done using Rough-DEMATEL technique. DEMATEL is a widely used technique that is applied for a structured analysis of a complex problems. The rough variant of DEMATEL helps include the uncertainty and vagueness of decision maker related to the I4.0 technologies.

“Technological immaturity,” “High investment,” “Lack of awareness and customer acceptance” and “technological limitations and lack of eco-innovation” are identified as the most prominent barriers for adoption of I4.0 in SFSC.

Successful mitigation of these barriers will improve the sustainability of FSCs through accelerated adoption of I4.0 solutions. The findings of the study will help managers, practitioners and planners to understand and successfully mitigate these barriers.

Ground-handling services are important for effective aircraft operations in the air transportation system. Airlines often outsource these services to ground-handling agents through business-to-business (B2B) marketing decisions. Therefore, this paper aims to address the problem of ground-handling agent selection in the airline industry.

A real-world case study was carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the integrated best worst method and fuzzy multi-attribute ideal real comparative analysis (F-MAIRCA) approach to solve ground-handling agent selection problems under uncertainty and imprecision. A two-stage sensitivity analysis was also conducted to ensure the credibility and validity of the application.

In the weighting stage, “Quality” was determined as the most important criterion in terms of supplier performance. With regard to the performance of the ground-handling agents, A2 was found as the optimal supplier in terms of both credibility and validity.

This study enumerated several criteria that ground-handling agents must meet in order to effectively supply services for the airlines. In addition, this study provides a novel framework from which managers can gain additional benefits from their businesses. Finally, it is concluded that this approach will help airline managers quantitatively in choosing the most appropriate ground-handling agent.

The contributions of this study to the existing literature are twofold. First, we propose a novel multiple attribute decision-making approach to address the problem of supplier selection for airlines under uncertainty and imprecision. Second, the selection of ground-handling agents from the B2B perspective is addressed for the first time in literature.

It is challenging to derive an appropriate tolerance relation for tolerance rough set-based classifiers (TRSCs). The traditional tolerance rough set employs a simple distance function to determine the tolerance relation. However, such a simple function does not take into account criterion weights and the interaction among criteria. Further, the traditional tolerance relation ignores interdependencies concerning direct and indirect influences among patterns. This study aimed to incorporate interaction and interdependencies into the tolerance relation to develop non-additive grey TRSCs (NG-TRSCs).

For pattern classification, this study applied non-additive grey relational analysis (GRA) and the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique to solve problems arising from interaction and interdependencies, respectively.

The classification accuracy rates derived from the proposed NG-TRSC were compared to those of other TRSCs with distinctive features. The results showed that the proposed classifier was superior to the other TRSCs considered.

In addition to pattern classification, the proposed non-additive grey DEMATEL can further benefit the applications for managerial decision-making because it simplifies the operations for decision-makers and enhances the applicability of DEMATEL.

This paper contributes to the field by proposing the non-additive grey tolerance rough set (NG-TRS) for pattern classification. The proposed NG-TRSC can be constructed by integrating the non-additive GRA with DEMATEL by using a genetic algorithm to determine the relevant parameters.

Selecting the most appropriate healthcare waste treatment technology (HCWTT) is an uncertain and complex decision-making problem because there exist more than one alternative and many conflicting qualitative and quantitative criteria. However, the use of fuzzy and comparative values, instead of specific crisp values, provides more accurate results, so that the alternatives may be evaluated in accordance with hesitant human nature. The purpose of this paper is to select the best HCWTT using a hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS).

Five main criteria were identified for HCWTT selection, such as economic, social, environmental, technical and ergonomic criteria. In total, 19 sub-criteria were examined, and the hierarchy of the criteria was formed. The criteria weights were determined using the multi-criteria hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (MC-HFLTS). The selection processes of incineration (A₁), steam sterilization (A₂), microwave (A₃) and landfill (A₄) alternatives were carried out using the multi-attributive ideal-real comparative analysis (MAIRCA) and multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) methods. In the comparative analyses, Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods were used.

The comparison of the results of the MABAC and MAIRCA methods with the results of VIKOR and TOPSIS methods indicated that A₂ (steam sterilization) alternative was the best one and produced the same ranking of the technology alternatives (A₂ > A₃ > A₁ > A₄). As a result, the study concluded that these methods can be successfully used for HCWTT selection problems.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, MC-HFLTS has not been used to select HCWTT in the existing literature. For the first time, MC-HFLTS&MAIRCA and MC-HFLTS&MABAC approaches were used in order to choose the best treatment method for healthcare waste under the effect of multiple conflicting hierarchical criteria. It has been provided that MABAC and MAIRCA select alternative choices by taking into consideration the hierarchical criteria. Unlike other studies, this study also considered ergonomic criteria that are important for people working during the process of using the treatment technology.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) of maintenance systems serve as benchmarks to workers and organizations to compare their goals for decision-making purposes. Unfortunately, the effects of one KPI on the other are least known, restraining decisions on prioritization of KPIs. This article examines and prioritizes the KPIs of the maintenance system in a food processing industry using the novel Taguchi (T) scheme-decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method, Taguchi–Pareto (TP) scheme–DEMATEL method and the DEMATEL method.

The causal association of maintenance process parameters (frequency of failure, downtime, MTTR, MTBF, availability and MTTF) was studied. Besides, the optimized maintenance parameters were infused into the DEMATEL method that translates the optimized values into cause and effect responses and keeping in view the result of analysis. Data collection was done from a food processing plant in Nigeria.

The results indicated that downtime and availability have the most causal effects on other criteria when DEMATEL and T-DEMATEL methods were respectively applied to the problem. Furthermore, the frequency of failure is mostly affected by other criteria in the key performance indication selection using the two methods. The combined Taguchi scheme and DEMATEL method is appropriate to optimize and establish the causal relationships of factors.

Hardly any studies have reported the joint optimization and causal relationship of maintenance system parameters. However, the current study achieves this goal using the T-DEMATEL, TP-DEMATEL and DEMATEL methods for the first time. The applied methods effectively ease decisions on prioritization of KPIs for enhancement.

This paper aims to recognise and identify fears of failure in the international entrepreneurship ecosystem and find the effects of these fears on each other to reduce these increasing effects and minimise the mental barriers for potential entrepreneurs. Therefore, this research is beneficial to strengthen international entrepreneurial personality and to reduce the shadows of fears on entrepreneurs’ minds. To address this purpose the international tourism industry has been investigated in the emerging economy of Iran.

This paper is organised based on experts' opinions, and then factors are identified by literature review and are finalised through the Delphi method with a panel of practical and academic experts. These fears are categorised using a questionnaire and factor analysis (FA) technique. The respondents were entrepreneurship students and tourism entrepreneurs. Subsequently, the effect and importance of fears of failure are scored and ranked by some experts. These fears were analysed through decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method. The results presented the effects of fears of failure in the international entrepreneurial in the tourism industry and the relationship amongst them.

The first two fears are respectively “fears of future” which are caused by the unclear situation; and “fear of losing credit” that is due to the importance of “personal relationships” in Iranians culture. As pointed out by results, “fear of future” is the most effective group of factors that may lead to other fears too. This fear seems important in the international entrepreneurial tourism industry because of future ambiguity.

This study indicates the relations between groups of fears and offers some practical and applicable solutions to reduce these effects. To the best knowledge of the authors, analysing the relationship between fears amongst the entrepreneurs has not been investigated previously.

To develop a fuzzy causal model of enterprise flexibility dimensions in a case study of Indian pharmaceutical industry.

The eight dimensions of enterprise flexibility were identified based on literature review. Fermatean fuzzy decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (FF-DEMATEL) technique is applied to develop the cause-and-effect interrelationship model among various enterprise flexibility dimensions.

The information technology flexibility, supply chain flexibility, technical flexibility and marketing flexibility are found to be causing/influencing other flexibilities and contributing to overall enterprise flexibilities. Therefore, more attention needs to be paid to develop and sustain them for competitive advantage.

Fermatean fuzzy sets offer more flexibility and more accurate handling complex uncertain group decision making. FF-DEMATEL is a more accurate method to develop inter-dependencies and causal model than ISM, TISM. Ratings from the limited number of decision experts (DEs) from few pharmaceutical firms were done. Future study should take bigger sample of firms and more number of DEs to generalize the findings.

The model will help managers in pharmaceutical industry to prioritize the dimensions of enterprise flexibility to achieve agility, responsiveness, resilience and competitive advantage.

To the best knowledge of the authors, causal modeling enterprise flexibility dimensions using FF-DEMATEL has been studied for the first time in a developing economy context.