Ranking the strategies of mining sector through anp and topsis in a swot framework.

Mining plays one significant role in most countries and it acts as a foundation for growth and development. It produces raw material for other sectors such as industry, agriculture, etc. So, determining and prioritizing the strategies of mining are so important. Miscellaneous types of tools are offered for determining and evaluating of operational strategies. Analyzing the internal and external environments using strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) helps to determine the current situation and to identify major prospects and challenges that could significantly impact strategy implementation in mining sector. Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are appropriate tools to prioritize under sophisticated environment. Analytical network process (ANP) and TOPSIS are two hands of MCDM methods that are used in different researches. In this paper, we proposed an integrated model for prioritizing the strategies of Iranian mining sector. We employed the SWOT analysis to assign feasible strategies; then, ANP was applied in order to obtain the weight of SWOT factors, finally the strategies were ranked through TOPSIS technique. The results show that improving the ability of exploitation and production outperforms other strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]