Supplier selection management has been considered as an important subject for industrial organizations. In order to remain on the market, to gain profitability and to retain competitive advantage, business units need to establish an integrated and structured supplier selection system. In addition, environmental protection problems have been big solicitudes for organizations to consider green approach in supplier selection problem. However, finding proper suppliers involves several variables and it is critically a complex process. In this paper, the main attention is focused on finding the right supplier based on fuzzy multi criteria decision making (MCDM) process. The weights of criteria are calculated by analytical hierarchical process (AHP) and the final ranking is achieved by fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS). TOPSIS advantage among the other similar methods is to obtain the best solution close to ideal solution. The paper attempts to express better understanding by an example of an automobile manufacturing supply chain.

For decades, due to the increasing generation of waste and its negative environmental impacts, efficient municipal solid waste management (MSWM) has become a major concern of sustainable development. On the other hand, selecting an appropriate strategy remains a critical issue for municipal authorities without applying a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. This study aims to select the best MSWM strategy from five potential MSW management strategies under various factors that influence waste strategy selection, such as economic, social, technical, and environmental factors. This study used three fuzzy integrated MCDM methods, namely the Decision-Making Trail and Evaluation Laboratory (DMATEL), the Analytic Network Process (ANP) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to select best MSWM strategies. The study used data from a survey of experts who had knowledge of waste management. The survey data was then analyzed using the DMATEL, ANP and TOPSIS methods under a fuzzy environment. The Fuzzy DEMATEL method is used to identify the causal relationships among the criteria and sub-criteria, while ANP is applied to determine the relative weights of MSWM strategy selection sub-criterion. Finally, TOPSIS is used to rank the waste management strategies depending on established sub-criteria. The result of fuzzy TOPSIS demonstrated that recycling of municipal solid waste is the best alternative which has the highest closeness coefficient followed by reuse. Thus, the result of this study revealed that MSWM strategies are ranked as: waste recycling (A1), reuse (A2), reduce (A1), energy recovery (A4), and disposal (A5), with closeness coefficient values of 0.80, 0.61, 0.60, 0.47, and 0.17, respectively.

Sustainability is getting preference now-a-days in most of the countries in the world. This implies industrial and other developments for economic growth, and of course civilization, but certainly not at the cost of environmental degradation. Environmental conservation is a must. One of the major components of industrial sectors is their electrical energy inputs through electrical substation. Numerous research addresses the issue of energy pollution, cantering on fossil fuel. A very few research can be found which address the issue of pollution generated from electrical energy. This research addresses this issue, with special attention to electrical substations. In the last two or three decades, several electrical equipment manufacturers have started producing this equipment in Bangladesh, which were previously import-oriented. This equipment use various types of oils, acids, zinc and other metals, which are all environmentally hazardous. Thus, any industrial company, buying such equipment from substation manufacturers, should consider green aspects. As such, now it is of prime importance to select green suppliers of substation equipment. Since selection of right or green supplier involves multi-criteria evaluation, Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique is essential. Additionally, both qualitative and quantitative criteria require fuzzy analysis to make it more precise and realistic. This research addressed the issue of environmental pollution, its sources, nature and severity, and their mitigation through selecting green suppliers.

Entrepreneurship is considered as the key factor of economic growth and development in modern day. Entrepreneurship takes place either individually or organizationally and they normally undertake the risk of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs experience the most severe conditions when they deal with a government, which is completely unfamiliar with some rules. If a government supports an entrepreneur one with the required characteristics, then entrepreneurship is facilitated largely for both individuals and organizations. This article provides definitions, features and the effective factors on realization of an entrepreneur government with respect to significance of such a government. To this end, a list of factors that may lead to realization of entrepreneur government was derived from previous studies and then the fuzzy TOPSIS method and collected opinions of experts were applied to facilitate the determination of each of these factors. Finally, a list of influential factors was presented with regards to effective factors on realization of entrepreneur government.

This paper performs an investigation to rank different strategies in an engineering firm in Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among all experts who worked for a firm in engineering field named Kara Sazeh Matin. The study first determines four key strategies for development of firm’s objectives including improvement in buy/sell system and marketing planning, financial and cost management, human resources management and technology management. The study ranks these attributes based on fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) in fuzzy format. The results indicate the firm must take over one of the well-known construction firms to develop its operations.

Strategic warehouse location-allocation problem is a multi-staged decision-making problem having both numerical and qualitative criteria. In order to survive in the global business scenario by improving supply chain performance, companies must examine the cross-functional drivers in the optimization of logistic systems. A meticulous observation makes evident that strategy warehouse location selection has become challenging as the number of alternatives and conflicting criteria increases. The issue becomes particularly problematic when the conventional concept has been applied in dealing with the imprecise nature of the linguistic assessment. The qualitative decisions for selection process are often complicated by the fact that often it is imprecise for the decision makers. Such problem must be overcome with defined efforts. Fuzzy multi-criteria decision making methods have been used in this research as aids in making location-allocation decisions. The anticipated methods in this research consist of two steps at its core. In the first step, the criteria of the existing problem are inspected and identified and then the weights of the sector and subsector are determined that have come to light by using Fuzzy AHP. In the second step, eligible alternatives are ranked by using TOPSIS and Fuzzy TOPSIS comparatively. A demonstration of the application of these methodologies in a real life problem is presented.

The main objective of this study is to identify the most important criteria and indicators in selection of business intelligence vendors, and ranking the vendors of such tools using Fuzzy Analytical hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS), to compare results of these two methods and to provide appropriate solutions for the sample company, namely National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC).
Spearman & apos; s rank correlation test was used for comparing the methods and determining their correlation. A strong positive correlation was observed between the ranks of business intelligence tools at the significance level of 0.05 in both methods. The results of the ranking by means of FAHP method show that IBM Company was the best one, followed by Oracle, SAS, QlikTech, SAP and Microsoft. However, based on the FTOPSIS method, Oracle was the leading company, followed by IBM, SAS and SAP and finally Microsoft.

The 20th century was the age of an industry-based as well as knowledge-based economy. In a knowledge-based economy, knowledge plays an essential role to produce wealth compared with other tangible and physical assets. The purpose of this research is to identify and rank different aspects of knowledge management based on the Hicks model using the fuzzy TOPSIS technique for one of the most prestigious universities in Iran. The proposed model considers four main criteria of knowledge including creation, distribution, storage, and application along with 17 sub-criteria. The Chi-square correlation test indicates a positive and meaningful correlation between four mentioned criteria and knowledge management implementation. Using the fuzzy TOPSIS technique, the results also indicate that “Need for new and updated information and knowledge” was selected as the most important sub-criterion and “Sharing or distribution of knowledge” was selected as the most important main criterion on Hicks model.

Food industries as one of the most important industries in country, needs appropriate planning at both macro and micro levels. One of the important parts, which need to be discussed is the supply chain management in this industry. In this study, the importance of supply chain in food industries is studied. The proposed study determines different suppliers and using various criteria, the study applies Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank different alternatives. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed model of this paper is capable of determining appropriate suppliers in food industry.

During the past two decades, there have been some concerns on application of multiple criteria decision making on prioritizing production planning. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to use Technique of ranking by similarity by positive ideal solution (TOPSIS) for ranking various alternatives productions in an Iranian firm in Faucet industry named Irandoosh. The proposed study uses fuzzy numbers to handle uncertainty and using five criteria of profitability, life cycle, quality, social issues and production capacity, analytical hierarchy process is employed to rank various alternatives and then rank different products based on TOPSIS technique.