Warranty is recognized as an important component of product marketing and it can increase customers & apos; confidence. All services during warranty are considered as an additional cost for producers where these expenses are associated with product reliability and warranty components. Product reliability is also influenced by decisions taken in the field of product design and process and arrangement in this period. Product reliability also plays an important role in new products for production planning. As competition increases all around the world, there is an increasing interest in providing suitable substrates for the acceleration of economic growth and development and production. Warranty is one of the basic infrastructures and behaviors in today & apos; s competitive world, which is boosting sales and typically profits and customer & apos; s satisfaction and confidence play important roles in achieving this goal. In this study, we first evaluate warranty policies and strategies and then we consider after selling services taken in a case study. Finally, some strategies are introduced to improve the current situation and to achieve suitable model for ideal situation.

Contractor selection is a critical activity, which plays an important role in the overall success of any construction project. The implementation of fuzzy multiple criteria decision attribute (MCDA) in selecting contractors has the advantage of rendering subjective and implicit decision making more objective and transparent. An additional merit of fuzzy MCDA is the ability to accommodate quantitative and qualitative information. In this paper, an integrated VIKOR–AHP methodology is proposed to make a selection among the alternative contractors in one of Iranian construction industry projects. In the proposed methodology, the weights of the selection criteria are determined by fuzzy pairwise comparison matrices of AHP.

The objective of this study is to measure the performance improvement of supply chain (SC) stages through implementing the national standardization system (NSS) in an innovative way. There are many studies on the positive effects of standardization system on supply chain performance (SCP), but very few studies have measured and prioritized the impact of this system on SCP. This paper introduces a new approach to the performance improvement of each stage of SC through implementing the NSS. First, we use fuzzy analytical hierarchical process method to measure the relative importance of each stage and determine the characteristics of SC. Then, the amount of SC stages improvement after implementing the NSS is determined. Finally, using a combination of results, the stages of SC are ranked according to the effectiveness of NSS implementation. In order to validate the proposed approach, the case analysis of Iran NSS is carried out on broiler SC. The stages of SC are ranked according to the performance improvement through implementing standardization system, subsequently. This approach can be generalized to other standardization systems and SCs.

There are many opportunities and challenges in the area of Indian technical education due to liberalization and globalization of economy. One of these challenges is how to assess the performance of technical institutions based on multiple criteria. The purpose of this paper is to describe and illustrate an application of a structured approach to determine relative performance and ranking of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) under multi-criteria environment. To evaluate the alternatives in respect to stakeholders’ preference we suggest a new methodology consisting of fuzzy AHP, DEA and TOPSIS. Fuzzy AHP technique is used to determine the weights of criteria and some linguistic terms are applied to assess performance under each criterion, then in order to determine the value of linguistic terms we use the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method. Finally TOPSIS method is used to aggregate performance scores under different criteria into an overall performance score for each institution and ranking the institution according to their overall performance score. The proposed fuzzy AHP–DEA–TOPSIS methodology is applicable to any multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem due to its generic nature.

Ranking various alternatives has been under investigation and there are literally various methods and techniques for making a decision based on various criteria. One of the primary concerns on ranking methodologies such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is that decision makers cannot express his/her feeling in crisp form. Therefore, we need to use linguistic terms to receive the relative weights for comparing various alternatives. In this paper, we discuss ranking different alternatives based on the implementation of preference relation matrix based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets.

Portfolio selection is one of the important problems encountered by any investor. The purpose of this paper is to solve a real stock portfolio selection problem in Iran. According to the uncertain environments in which financial decisions are made, most of the recent works in this field use fuzzy sets theory in order to incorporate these uncertainties into their analysis. The problem is to determine how to allocate a limited fund among the stocks of some pharmaceutical companies in Tehran stock exchange. For this purpose we apply two fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) methods to this problem. Finally, the results obtained from the two methods are compared in terms of the solution quality.

With the increasing importance and the role that websites play in all aspects of life, more and more web development projects are being undertaken by companies. One of the key decisions in which both short-term and long-term success of the project depends is choosing the right development platform. Its criticality can be judged by the fact that once a platform is chosen, one has to live with it throughout the software development life cycle. The entire shape of the project depends on the language, operating system, tools, frameworks etc., in short the web development platform chosen. In addition, choosing the right platform is a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. We propose a fuzzy analytical hierarchy process model to solve the MCDM problem. We try to tap the real-life modeling potential of fuzzy logic and conjugate it with the commonly used powerful AHP modeling method.