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[Display omitted] • Main developments on sorting approaches. • The categorization of multiple-criteria decision-making sorting methods. • Applications of the multiple-criteria decision-making sorting methods. • Trends and future directions of MCDM Sorting. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a complex process. It aims to support decision makers in making their decisions more effective and consistent. MCDM provides a useful and successful alternative for handling three main types of MCDM problems, namely, choosing, ranking and sorting. The first two are the most common problems studied but the third offers a way to deal with real world MCDM problems that require alternatives to be assigned to ordered categories. The practitioners are currently developing and applying sorting methods to solve problems from different application areas. In spite of its interest and applicability, there is only one previous review on Multiple-Criteria sorting, performed almost 20 years ago. Hence, because of its interest this paper presents a new and systematic review of MCDM sorting methods that includes 30 years of research in the field. This review has systematically analyzed the conventional and non-classical methods of MCDM sorting and then classified the papers published into 16 application areas. The analysis reveals that the methodological development is still in growth phase for MCDM sorting and discovers the applied methods' trends. It also shows the complete spectrum of the areas of the application addressed, the state of knowledge about methods, the type of contribution to the knowledge, and the application area for the four categories of the MCDM approaches. The systematic review scrutinizes each selected article in order to find out which approach from the multi-criteria sorting presents the most development based on its contribution and application of the methods. We also aim to discover which Multiple-Criteria sorting methods are the most studied in MCDM. The relevant finding is the relation between the most applied methods and the application areas together with future directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Many individual attributes considered for personnel selection such as organizing ability, creativity, personality, and leadership exhibit vagueness and imprecision. The fuzzy set theory appears as an essential tool to provide a decision framework that incorporates imprecise judgments inherent in the personnel selection process. In this paper, a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) algorithm using the principles of fusion of fuzzy information, 2-tuple linguistic representation model, and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is developed. The proposed method is apt to manage information assessed using both linguistic and numerical scales in a decision making problem with multiple information sources. Furthermore, it enables managers to deal with heterogeneous information. The decision making framework presented in this paper employs ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator that encompasses several operators as the aggregation operator since it can implement different aggregation rules by changing the order weights. The aggregation process is based on the unification of information by means of fuzzy sets on a basic linguistic term set (BLTS). Then, the unified information is transformed into linguistic 2-tuples in a way to rectify the problem of loss information of other fuzzy linguistic approaches. The computational procedure of the proposed framework is illustrated through a personnel selection problem reported in an earlier study. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Travel websites provide customers diverse services including travel information and products through the internet. More and more people are used to plan their itineraries and acquire travel information by visiting travel websites. In the face of the strong competition environment, in order to profit by making customers proceed with transactions on the websites, travel websites should pay more attention to the improve the electronic service quality (e-SQ). e-SQ evaluation for travel websites can be treated as a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem modeled by the given hierarchical structure. As for evaluating e-SQ, since the traditional Likert scales cannot deal with uncertain assessments according to human intuition for the service quality evaluation, the fuzzy number is employed to measure decision-makers’ subjective preference. This paper aims to develop a genetic-algorithm-based method to automatically determine the degrees of importance of respective criteria. Then, critical criteria for evaluating service quality can be easily identified. In the empirical study, four representative travel websites in Taiwan are selected to determine the critical criteria concerned by customers. The findings provide useful information to travel websites for improving e-SQ. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we present a generalized model for handling prioritized multicriteria decision making systems. First, we present a new method for handling prioritized multicriteria decision making problems, where the weights of the lower priority criteria of each alternative depend on whether each alternative satisfies the requirements of all the higher priority criteria or not. Then, we also present a generalized prioritized multicriteria decision making method for handling multicriteria decision making problems, where some criteria may have equal priority which can be aggregated by the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator or the weighted averaging method. The proposed methods can overcome the drawbacks of the methods presented in [Yager, R. R. (2004a). Modeling prioritized multicriteria decision making. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part B: Cybernetics, 34(6), 2396–2404]. The proposed methods can handle multicriteria decision making problems in a more intelligent and more flexible manner. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: For ensuring the successful implementation of medical service investments, here an expert selection system of how ventures can better evaluate and select a favorable city to invest before that implementation has been developed. However, selecting an ideas city is a kind of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem requiring to consider a large number of complex factors that are based on the independence assumption. The analytic network process (ANP) is a relativly new MCDM method which can deal with all kinds of dependences systematically. With the advantages of ANP in hand, in this paper, we develop an effective method based on the ANP combined with the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to help medical service inventors who need to evaluate and select proper city. Additionally, an empirical study is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed method. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a fuzzy optimization method based on the concept of ideal and anti-ideal points to solve multi-criteria decision making problems under fuzzy environments. The quantitative criteria values of each alternative are represented by triangular fuzzy numbers, and its qualitative counterparts and the weight of each criterion are described by linguistic terms, which can also be expressed as triangular fuzzy numbers in the proposed method. With the definition of fuzzy ideal and anti-ideal weight distances, an objective function is constructed to derive the optimal evaluation for each alternative denoted by a fuzzy membership degree. The ranking of alternatives and the best one can be determined directly on the basis of the fuzzy membership degrees without a need to compare fuzzy numbers. The evaluation process is simple and easy to use in practice. A case study of reservoir flood control operation is given to demonstrate the proposed method’s effectiveness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]