In recent years, the buccal cancer in Taiwan has been ranked the fourth among the top ten leading causes of cancer death, and the first among people at the prime age ( 25 ~ 44 years old ). Since people at the prime age are usually the main bread winners in the family and the main contributors in the economic development of the society, how to prevent the occurrences of buccal cancers or how to provide proper medical service to buccal cancer patients has become an urgent topic of the present medical industry. It is pointed out that the incidence of buccal cancers is frequently related to men¡¦s smoking, diet habit and their chewing of betel nuts. Especially in Kaohsiung-Pingtung area in southern Taiwan, the population of chewing betel nuts is much higher than that in other metropolitan cities. Thus, the incidence of buccal cancers is in vogue in this area. The aim of the present study is to discuss the key factors affecting the quality of medical treatment on buccal cancer patients under the management system of E-Da Hospital. Based on this model, we wish to further apply it to other disease treatments as well and to make E-Da Hospital become a characteristic medical center in the near future. This thesis adopts the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to exploit the multi-estimate criteria models of the medical quality. The first layer is the key factor for medical quality to buccal cancer patients at E-Da Hospital. The second evaluation criterion is divided into three aspects: namely, ¡§the hospital image of medical service¡¨, ¡§the available administrative resources¡¨, and ¡§ the convenience for patients¡¦ taking medical treatment¡¨. The third layer is the twelve evaluation characteristics. From this point of view, we can easily understand why patients choose E-Da Hospital as their priority. The interviewed participants are composed of the surgeons, the nursing staff, the administration personnel at E-Da Hospital, and the buccal cancer patients and their family members. Fifteen effective questionnaires are collected. Based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process, each subject is interviewed throughout and the result is verified by ANOVA. Based on the present study, we have found that the key factors of the management system for medical quality to buccal cancer patients at E-Da hospital are listed below in sequence---¡§the hospital image of medical service¡¨, ¡§the convenience for patients¡¦ taking medical treatment¡¨, and then ¡§the available administrative resources¡¨. Among the twelve evaluation characteristics, the critical top five ones are ¡§medical team work¡¨, ¡§medical effects¡¨, ¡§equipment novelty¡¨, ¡§home visit after operation¡¨ and ¡§ the convenience of transportation¡¨ in order. Several recommendations have been made to hopefully improve the management system and medical quality at E-Da hospital by strengthening the in-job training to the physicians and nurses and renovating medical equipment continuously. Besides, it is expected to set up buccal cancer patient club in the near future in order to achieve ¡§the Five Whole Attendance of Cares¡¨ - the whole person, the whole family, the whole team, the whole journey, and the whole community. Meanwhile, some proposals have also been made to the related health departments of the government so as to promote education on cancer prevention, to create and develop economic & effective cancer sieve checks in order to reduce the possible waste on the consumption of the medical resources and make them benecifical to the health for all. In so doing, we hope that our government can stress its long-term planning and investment on improving its medical service and enhance its medical quality thereby.

In biotechnology industry, health-care food is the most influential product accounting for considerable market share. Nowadays, National Health Insurance has been in the red innumerably, and Bureau of National Health Insurance has become stricter toward the payment to medical systems. Consequently, the medical market is reapportioned. Preventive Medicine, which has no subsidies from National Health Insurance, has become the ¡§Blue Sea¡¨ soon that medical systems intend to develop, instead of its original unnoticed situation; also, health-care food is the main subject collocated within this area. However, Taiwan¡¦s health-care food has numerous brand names which have their own independent channels, unable to develop an established business model effectively due to the limits of their scales. Hence, although many health-care food companies have good products, they are unable to find a good partner with insight of appreciation, so that they can not survive in the market. This study has explored how to cultivate a business model to expand the health-care food market under the current macro-environment. In this study, health-care food companies were the research targets. Through questionnaire surveys, this study has explored that choosing different marketing channel structures will bring in different marketing channel benefits. In this study, based on channel planning in marketing strategy, through the collections of questionnaire data by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) Method, the key success factors in health-care food marketing channels have been induced, aimed at the interactive relationship between health-care food industry and the developing trend of the consumer market. Also, the market is divided into four groups, namely TV Shopping, convenient stores and professional comprehensive pharmacy chains, health-care food distributers, the state-owned enterprises systems operating health-care food, to produce the common (consistently indentified) key success factors and the individual difference factors. In the overall conclusions in this study, the high weight is given according to weighting value, and the priority is: unique marketing method, customer satisfaction survey mechanism (customer response), nationwide media advertisement benefit, headquarters¡¦ goodwill value (brand image), and mechanism of reducing inventory and distribution costs. But for the consideration of resources utilization, if the proprietors of health-care food marketing channels can carry out the foregoing key indicators step by step according to the priority, in order to gain competitive advantage in business management, they may yield twice the result with half the effort.

Since 2003, the density of convenient stores in Taiwan has surpassed it is in Japan and Taiwan has become one of the most competitive regions in the world. The business mode in modern convenient chain stores is established by a standard operating process to duplicate rapidly to form franchise in a short period of time and build up advantage of economies of scale. The advantage will then reduce the overall operating cost to increase the profit. In order to solve the problem of manpower shortage generated from the speeding expansion of stores, joining ¡§franchise¡¨ would become the ideal solution. The core development of known-how for the four major convenient chain stores, 7-ELEVEn, FamilyMart, HiLife, and OK, is based on business mode of franchise chain stores. As of the end of 2008, the total number of four major convenient chain stores has exceeded over nine thousand. The majority of them are franchise stores and the franchise rate reaches 87.5%. Therefore, how to establish a complete staff education training to ensure operating quality and maintain store competitiveness is one of the keys in the business strategy for main franchise branch. This paper uses a certain major convenient franchise store in Taiwan as the target, and focuses on the effectiveness on critical success factors of staff education and training in the convenient franchise store. This paper adopts AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), exploring from the reference and an interview in depth with company supervisors from the case to conclude five evaluation indicators of critical success factors and twenty-six success factors to create AHP questionnaires. Then, twenty-five senior store supervisors and franchise store managers were required to process questionnaire interview and select the critical success factors. The three top evaluation indicator of critical success factors in second layer of structure of the staff education and training in convenient franchise stores in order are: (1) staff attitude; (2) reward and punishment measures; and (3) training course planning. The top five critical success factors in the third layer of structure are: (1) the degree of learning requirement for part-time staff required by store manager; (2) vivid and lively teaching method; (3) degree of store learning atmosphere; (4) connection between learning effectiveness and franchise renewal; and (5) acceptance of store manager towards education training.

<p>ABSTRACTNowadays the importance of environmental logistics is increasing while organizations are trying to pay more attention to their transport activities. Since PNL is a famous logistics company in Nordic countries and transport activates are done by sub contractors they intend to make sound environmental choices by assessing their suppliers from environmental performance in order to identify the best suppliers which is comply with the PNL environmental policy.In this project the survey study and questionnaire has been made in order to evaluate the supplier performance from environmental perspective. At first the investigation has been made for improving the previous questionnaire which was made by PNL. Some parts were revised according to researchers‟ knowledge, reliable references and suggestion of environmental consultant. Lots of study has been made in order to find the most importing effects that can affect environmentalism. Obtained results from questionnaire were analyzed and appropriate suggestions were given in order to enlighten the significant importance of environmental issues.Due to complexity of decision making environment, the applicable and reliable method should be applied to cope with complexity and the factors that can affect the objective while simplifying the process. Analytical Hierarchy process has been applied for this project in order to change the qualitative situation into quantitative manner to rate the suppliers based on their performance.The first step in AHP process is constructing hierarchy in two or more level for evaluating the alternatives. The goal of the project is environmental performance .Second level is criteria which has been made according to literature and the importance of them while the suggestions of consultant has been applied as well. Third level is sub criteria which are questions of questionnaire and finally the forth level include alternative which is suppliers.Next step in AHP process is weighting criteria and sub criteria and making pair wise comparison between them. Procedure of weighting is done by researchers and managers from PNL in order to decrease the subjectivity of decision making process. The result from suppliers has been investigated and points were given to them according to their performance and ability regarding environmental logistics.Sensitivity analysis was made for analyzing the result from AHP in order to investigate the responsiveness of the result.Key words: Logistics, Environmentalism, AHP Method, Supplier Assessment, Survey Study.</p>

For any given reason, every year many countries spend a lot of money purchasing at least one weapon. Due to the secret character of the military, the decision process for specific weapon procurement is shrouded. Moreover, there are several funds loss cases due to mistakes in weapon contractions. Weapon procurement requires very large amounts of money which comes from tax payers. Therefore, an effort to reduce a possible monetary loss is needed. A decision process based on an analytic model can present a better chance to decision makers for better weapon decisions. In general, weapon procurement decision is a multi criteria environment. Decision making in such environments is defined as Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). MCDM is broadly classified into two areas: Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) and Multi-Objective Decision Making (MODM). MADM methods are used for selecting an alternative from a small explicit list of alternatives. MODM methods are used for designing problems involving an infinite number of alternatives implicitly defined by mathematical constraints. This research is intended to be used by the South Korean Navy when there is a need to select one weapon type among several candidate types. Therefore, MADM methods are used in this research.Many researches for developing an analytical model for better decision-making have been done. However, there is no research for a generalized weapon procurement decision model that is easy to implement. For this reason, whenever there is a need for weapon procurement decision, the Navy has to spend a lot of effort in determining the best weapon. These efforts can be reduced with a generalized model that is proposed in this research for naval weapon procurement. MADM methods determine alternatives ranking orders and the highest ranked alternative is the best one. Various MADM methods are used in computing the alternatives ranking scores.

China has the largest population and the fastest growing economy in the world. The general public's demand for health is rising promptly with the improvement of the living standard. However, the limited and unbalanced medical resource have caused the prominent problem of the society, even in the capital city of Beijing, the new hospital constructions with rational allocation is iminent and significant. Along with the technology development and Internet popularization, GIS approaches and related products has been widely used in the people's daily life. The main focus of this paper is to select a site for building a new hospital in Haidian District of Beijing using GIS-based Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA). With Analytical Hieraichy Process(AHP) and Rank Order Method (ROM) for the weight setting on factor criteria, necessity tests and sensitivity tests are applied to check which criteria are really necessary and how the results are sensitive to their weight change. The optimal site located in Wenquan Town (E: 116.182, N:40.039) is screened from several candidate sites usin Google Earth maps, which makes the ultimate result more convincing and practical. It can be concluded that GIS-based MCA with necessity and sensitivity tests proposes a novel and useful reference to other site selection decision makers, and also provides constructive tools for the public asministration to set up efficent databases for decision makers to carry out spatial analyses. To make it more maneuverable and practical, a further research on th improvement of this method will have a promising future.

This thesis was aimed at the development of a Geographical Information System (GIS) based model to support the Rwanda Land Use and Development Master Plan. Developing sustainable land management is the main task of this master plan. Stakeholder’s involvement was of key importance. Their demands should be analysed and visualised to support discussions and the decision-making process. Spatial Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a proven method for land-use planning purposes. However, most land-use planning applications focus on a specific theme, such as urban development. In addition, land-use planning is often limited to a relatively small area. This thesis focused at the development of a countrywide GIS model, containing all land-uses accommodated in three main land-use categories: urban, agriculture and conservation. The GIS model was largely based on the Land-Use Conflict Identification Strategy (LUCIS) model. Many of the goals, objectives, and subobjectives that described the earlier mentioned land-use categories were adopted from the original model. However, a significant number of them were dropped, and new were created to suit the Rwandan situation. Stakeholder’s involvement was realized by assigning weights to the goals and preference maps. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used as weighting method. ESRI’s ArcGIS ModelBuilder was used to give the model shape in the GIS. Firstly, suitability maps were created of all elements in the model. The suitability maps were then transformed into preference maps by weighting them. In the next step the preference maps were collapsed in three classes: low, medium and high preference. Finally, the preference maps of the three land-use categories were combined, in order to visualize conflict areas. Ortho photos proved to be useful when acting as reference for the suitability and preference maps. Despite a large number of missing datasets, the GIS model was executed to simplify the understanding. However, many of the obtained results were unreliable because of the incompleteness of datasets, and can therefore not be used for decision-making.  Unfortunately, due to the stage of the project it was not possible to obtain weights from the stakeholders, and should therefore be done when the time is right. Right Choice DSS, a very user-friendly decision support application, was proposed to use for calculating weights. To conclude, the developed GIS model integrated countrywide land-use suitability mapping and stakeholders’ wishes that can be used for discussions and decision making.

There are a number of decision making problems in which Geographical Information System (GIS) has employed to organize and facilitate the procedure of analyzing the problem. These GIS-based decision problems which typically include a number of different criteria and alternatives are generally analyzed by Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA).Different locations within a geographical area represent the alternatives by which the overall goal of the project is achieved. The quality of achieving the goal is evaluated by a set of criteria which should be considered in the work. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) which is a powerful method of MCDA generally can organize spatial problems and decides which alternatives are most suitable for the defined problems. However due to some intrinsic uncertainty in the method, a number of authors suggest fuzzifying the method while others are against fuzzification of the AHP. The debate over fuzzifying AHP is going on and attempt for finding that was mostly in theory, and little, if any; practical comparison between the AHP and fuzzified AHP has done. This work presents a practical comparison of AHP and fuzzy AHP in a GIS-based problem, case study, for locating a dam in Costa Rica, considering different criteria. In order to perform the AHP and fuzzy AHP in the GIS-based problem and calculating weights of the criteria by the methods, some computer codes have written and developed in MATLAB. The comparisons between the AHP and fuzzy AHP methods are done on result weights and on the result final maps. The comparison between the weights is repeated on different levels of uncertainty in fuzzy AHP then all the results are compared with the result of AHP method. Also this study for checking the effect of fuzzification on results is suggested Chi-Square test as a suitable tool. Comparisons between the resulting weights of the AHP and fuzzy AHP methods show some differences between the methods. Furthermore, the Chi-Square test shows that the higher level of uncertainty in the fuzzy AHP, the greater the difference in results between the AHP and fuzzy AHP methods.

This degree project is divided into two subprojects. Both of the projects are executed for Fogmaker, a company that specialises in designing and installing fire suppression systems in engine compartments. These projects are executed according to product development methods. The first subproject described in this report is about designing a handle for the transportation of a 35kg weighing fire extinguisher. The handle functions as a safety seal and as a grip that makes it easier and safer to lift the fire extinguisher. A casted zinc T-handle is the best solution based on cost and AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) analysis. An FMECA (Failure Mode Effect and Criticality Analysis) and a FEM (Finite Element Method) study have been performed to verify the design. A zinc prototype of the safety handle has been manufactured and is ready for testing. It is expected that 10.000 handles will be produced every year once this prototype is approved by Fogmaker. The second subproject concerns a connection hub placed on a pressurized bottle. In order to make the fire suppression system more reliable this component needs to be redesigned. An external company with the required expertise in hydraulic systems will develop the connection hub in cooperation with Fogmaker, based on the conceptual designs described in this report. An FMECA of the new connection hub concept proves this redesign increases the safety of the system. The overlying subject of both of these projects is the safety of the fire suppression system. Thanks to the accomplishment of both project, the system has become safer and more reliable.

Logistics outsourcing has been applied in practices by enterprises for decades, but its efficiency is always restricted because logistics service providers (LSPs) often only have a single function such as delivery or warehousing. In the last few years, LSPs have upgraded their capabilities to support some other logistics services including value-added services, materials management, information-related services etc. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the differences between self-built logistics system and outsourcing logistics system by using the Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats (SWOT) strategic analysis; and figure out how to apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to make an appropriate selection among LSPs that based on the single-case study of Gevalia. Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been used in this study, authors expect to describe and explore the application of AHP approach regarding to the case company which implements outsourcing logistics system. Accordingly, it could be a good idea for case company to implement the mixed mode of self-built and outsourcing logistics system after using the SWOT strategic analysis. In addition, the production and logistics manager of case company emphasized that the five selection criteria including “compatibility”, “delivery performance”, “location”, “management” and “cost” should be considered as a priority among other different criterion when he selected a LSP. As a result, it will be efficient and effective for us to simulate a best decision for those industrial manufacturing enterprises to achieve a path regarding to the selection of the best logistics partner that based on the significant AHP approach.