Industrial and Management Systems Engineering

 

Date of this Version

11-2010

Comments

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Master of Science, Major: Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, Under the Supervision of Professor Erick C. Jones. Lincoln, Nebraska: November, 2010
Copyright 2010 Liyuan Zhang

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has emerged as an important technology with many possible applications in a wide variety of fields. It is said that RFID can perform well in transportation system. Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles (NEDMV) is using this technique to perform an analysis on utilizing RFID license plates to assist with Commercial Vehicle Information Systems and Networks (CVISN) program with the cooperation of many other stakeholders. Previous House of Quality (HOQ) analysis evaluates stakeholders’ needs and provides the pairwise comparison values of six important technical requirements for each stakeholder. Based on these, this research aims to seek for the comprehensive ranking of the six technical requirements.

The weights of different technical requirements vary a lot according to different stakeholders. As a result, assumptions are made to make it possible that fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach could be used to give weight rankings of this multiple-criteria decision making problem. Problem comes out naturally that whether or not fuzzy AHP is appropriate to solve this problem. To verify the feasibility of application of fuzzy AHP to CVISN project problem, benchmarking comparison of classical AHP and fuzzy AHP approaches is performed. The comparison bases on a series of statistical models with 240 randomly generated statistical data. Results of comparison indicate that the pairwise weight values of AHP approach positively affect the difference between the two approaches, and fuzzy AHP could narrow the differences of weights among different criteria.

Benchmarking models provide basic parameters, based on which prediction intervals are built to verify the outcomes of CVISN project given by fuzzy AHP. Results show that fuzzy AHP is an appropriate approach for CVISN project. Finally a comprehensive weight vector of six technical requirements is provided by fuzzy AHP, catering to the requirements of further research on choosing a best RFID system.

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