Comparative studies of multi-criteria decision making with application to condition monitoring of a ship turbine

Abstract

Problems in multi-criteria decision making have always been of considerable interest to researchers over the decades, with various techniques and methodologies evolving continuously in this area. The use of fuzzy-set-based approaches has been widely documented in problems where the qualitative or subjective nature of the data, with information ambiguity or data imprecision, is inherent. In recent times, the approach of evidential reasoning, based on the Dempster–Shafer theory which considers uncertainty of a similar nature, has emerged as an alternative. As such, questions have arisen on the merits, and hence the accuracy, of these two kinds of method, i.e. the fuzzy-set-based approach and evidential reasoning, when applied to the considered problem. This paper aims to address some of these questions through a comparative study on the use of fuzzy-set-based methods and evidential reasoning methodology on the condition monitoring of a turbine on a transportation ship. Since the assessment of the ranking problem of the condition-monitoring technique has been well investigated and reported in the literature, methodical comparisons of the results obtained from the fuzzy-set-based methods and the evidential reasoning approach are studied. In the studies, it was concluded that the use of assessment with evidential reasoning, which considers incomplete information, provides identical results with those of fuzzy-set-based methods. The paper also revealed how the use of the evidential reasoning approach could replace fuzzy-set-based methods, which often demands complete subjective information.