The evaluation and selection of energy technologies involve a large number of attributes whose selection and weighting is decided in accordance with the social, environmental, technical and economic framework. In the present work an integrated multiple attribute decision making methodology is developed by combining graph theory and analytic hierarchy process methods to deal with the evaluation and selection of energy technologies. The energy technology selection attributes digraph enables a quick visual appraisal of the energy technology selection attributes and their interrelationships. The preference index provides a total objective score for comparison of energy technologies alternatives. Application of matrix permanent offers a better appreciation of the considered attributes and helps to analyze the different alternatives from combinatorial viewpoint. The AHP is used to assign relative weights to the attributes. Four examples of evaluation and selection of energy technologies are considered in order to demonstrate and validate the proposed method.

In response to increasing inflexible customer demands and to improve the competitive advantage, industrial organizations have to adopt strategies to achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer service and on-time delivery performance. Selection of the most suitable plant or facility layout design for an organization is one among the most important strategic issues to fulfill all these above-mentioned objectives. Nowadays, many industrial organizations have come to realize the importance of proper selection of the plant or facility layout design to survive in the global competitive market. Selecting the proper layout design from a given set of candidate alternatives is a difficult task, as many potential qualitative and quantitative criteria need to be considered. This paper proposes a Euclidean distance based approach (WEDBA) as a multiple attribute decision making method to deal with the complex plant or facility layout design problems of the industrial environment. Three examples are included to illustrate the approach.

A paper published by Maniya and Bhatt (2011) (An alternative multiple attribute decision making methodology for solving optimal facility layout design selection problems, Computers & Industrial Engineering, 61, 542-549) proposed an alternative multiple attribute decision making method named as “Preference Selection Index (PSI) method” for selection of an optimal facility layout design. The authors had claimed that the method was logical and more appropriate and the method gives directly the optimal solution without assigning the relative importance between the facility layout design selection attributes. This note discusses the mathematical validity and the shortcomings of the PSI method.

The selection of appropriate alternative in the industrial environment is an important but, at the same time, a complex and difficult problem because of the availability of a wide range of alternatives and similarity among them. Therefore, there is a need for simple, systematic, and logical methods or mathematical tools to guide decision makers in considering a number of selection attributes and their interrelations. In this paper, a hybrid decision making method of graph theory and matrix approach (GTMA) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is proposed. Three examples are presented to illustrate the potential of the proposed GTMA-AHP method and the results are compared with the results obtained using other decision making methods.