An Improved SWOT Analysis Based On Axiomatic Fuzzy Sets AHP And TOPSIS

Strategic management is the set of managerial decision and action that determines long-run performance of a corporation. The study of strategic management therefore emphasizes the mon-itoring and evaluating of external opportunities and threats in lights of a corporation's strengths and weaknesses, this is known as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analy-sis. The SWOT analysis has been used from decades as a tool to assist strategic planning in various type of enterprises including those in the construction industry specially in the stage of extract-ing strategies. Whilst the use of SWOT analysis is quite common and popular, it still, however, continuous to have certain structural problems; The most important of which are the lack of con-sidering uncertain and two sided factors, and the lack of prioritization of the factors. Hence, in this approach, we make some improvements to make SWOT more helpful in strategic management; SWOT is assisted with some simple rationally quantitative models; We then obtained what we call an improved SWOT. This will be done, by incorporating within the SWOT analysis some MCDM methods; The proposed approach applies the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to find weights of criteria via pair-wise comparison, uses the obtained weights values as inputs for the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity of Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methodology, which is used to prioritize (rank) the strategies alternatives via the closeness coefficient. In contrast with previous methodologies as described in the literature, This research focus on applying the Axiomatic Fuzzy Sets (AFS) theory within the AHP and TOPSIS, weights values of criteria are directly deduced from the total number of appearance of these criteria in each alternative description given by AFS theory. The advantage of dealing with AFS theory in the proposed approach is that, it can directly be applied to the data, however, the traditional fuzzy set theory deals with fuzzy numbers and it is clear that different fuzzy numbers will lead to different results, hence the inconsistency of previous methodology copes with the methodology proposed in this thesis. A case study on a tex-tile firm shows that the new SWOT approach is more helpful to strategic planners. This research provides an augmented SWOT analysis approach for strategists to conduct strategic planning in an organization (industry or a firm). It also contributes fresh insights into strategic planning by introducing rationally analytic processes to improve the SWOT analysis. Furthermore, we also introduce another useful tool from Rough set theory, called "Reduct" which we redefined via AFS theory, and which reduces considerably the set of criteria (attributes) to a minimal set of attributes by discarded redundant ones...