Evaluating Sustainable Development Planning Using Fuzzy MCDM Approach

Summary:

The purpose of the paper was to examine an industry that wants to pursue sustainable development planning. This situation can be regarded as a fuzzy MCDM program. The paper proposes an alternative approach, to cope with evaluation of fuzzy MCDM problems, particularly where there is dependence among considered criteria. The authors chose the sustainable development strategy for fishing in Taiwan to illustrate the fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for determining the weights of criteria.

Technique:

Hierarchy frame for sustainable development planning

In this paper the authors employ triangular fuzzy numbers to represent the decision makers’ subjective preferences on the considered criteria, as well as for the criteria measurements to evaluate a sustainable development planning strategy for industry.

The overall MCDM approach the authors used to evaluate a sustainable development planning:

1.      Establish a hierarchy frame for sustainable development planning where the preliminary classification consists of 3 aspects involving business activities, government policy and socioeconomic effects

2.      Employ factor analysis to extract 4 independent common factors from the criteria in business activities, government policy and socioeconomic effects

3.      Brought in 15 evaluators, including those from government sector who are in charge of sustainable development, academic experts, executives of aquatic products processors as well as members of environmental interest groups

4.      Integrate their subjective judgments to construct the evaluation frame using AHP composed of the 4 common factors and then derive the relative weights and non-fuzzy BNP values corresponding to each criterion

5.      The synthetic utility value corresponding to each sustainable development strategy is aggregated by the fuzzy weights with fuzzy performance values and the best investment strategies can then be decided

The authors use one overarching goal of sustainable development industry to examine aspects that impact the company to then apply criteria to decide which strategy is best.

Strengths:

1.      APH method for determining weights of criteria can reduce uncertainty when fuzzy MCDM  

2.      MCDM can be applied to situations that have multiple and mutually conflicting objectives

Challenges:

1.      The anticipated performance values of unquantifiable criteria cannot be specified with qualitative numerical data in qualitative evaluation

Conclusion:

Using this method, the authors demonstrate that the non-additive fuzzy integral technique can overcome the criteria non-independent case. By employing an additive aggregating method to derive the synthetic utility of participating companies are able to evaluate all available alternatives and determine preferable strategies which conform to sustainable development.

From: Omega (The International Journal o f Management Science) (2005). Retrieved from http://mcdm.ntcu.edu.tw/tzeng/publication/Evaluating%20sustainable%20fishing%20development%20strategies%20using%20a%20fuzzy%20MCDM%20approach.pdf