| Many real life decisions involve selection of one or more alternatives from a given set. These selection decisions are usually complicated by the existence of multiple, often conflicting objectives, criteria or influencing factors.; In this research, a generic approach is developed to accomplish any selection process from among a variety of alternatives. Since selection problems involve both qualitative and quantitative factors, one of our challenges is to construct a means to convert qualitative data into numerical values. To achieve that, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is employed as a methodology because of its positive effect on cross-functional communication. On the other hand, due to the fact that there are shortcomings in traditional QFD weighting scheme, an approach is proposed to construct relationship scores by capitalizing on fuzzy arithmetic and Monte Carlo simulation.; Furthermore, the proposed approach is comprised of a multi-objective optimization model that integrates quantitative factors with qualitative factors in order to ensure that necessary tradeoffs are made. Since there are drawbacks in traditional means of solving multi-objective problems, a simple solution methodology is proposed to overcome those drawbacks and generate preferred alternatives.; The proposed approach lastly suggests an approach to evaluate the preferred alternatives by considering the decision-maker's requirements. |
