Over the past two decades, quite a few scientists agree that global warming is real, it¡¦s already happening and that it is the result of our activities and not a natural occurrence. The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. Carbon dioxide and other gases warm the surface of the planet naturally by trapping solar heat in the atmosphere. Recently, government, non-profit organizations and firms put great emphasis on environmental issues. They also encourage those firms to develop alternative energy technologies. For example, the American government wants to invest $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future. A lot of excellent companies put great emphasis on green supply chain. Some firms try to do some research and development on alternative energy technologies. In this way, these companies can enhance business efficiency and competitiveness, providing better productivity and process. Many manufacturing firms have tried to introduce alternative energy technology to improve its operation performance and to keep its competitive advantages. Nevertheless, introducing and evaluating alternative energy technology are quite demanding, difficulties being both conceptual and operational. At the same time, firms need to adjust the internal processes. In this way, adopting alternative energy technologies become a very challenging task. In this thesis, the criterion was sifted by using an Analysis Hierarchy Process (AHP) to develop a general framework for evaluating and introducing alternative energy technology into a manufacturing firm is presented.

In Taiwan, under the competitive environment that exported fruits enter the market gradually, domestic fruits should manifest their features through the establishment of product brands and governmental certifications. In addition, the consumer behavior such as consumers¡¦ habits and characteristics of choosing domestic fruits will become the key factors whether domestic fruits will have great market share successfully. Therefore, this study intends to explore what the key factors are when our countrymen choose domestic fruits. Through Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) Method, the key indicators that our countrymen choose domestic fruits have been established. Through complete collections of related literatures, including the collections and the explorations of literatures such as consumer behavior, Consumer Decision-Making Model, product attributes, and consumers¡¦ characteristics of choosing fruits, this study has constructed the key indicators that our countrymen choose domestic fruits, in which the aspects of product, consumer habit and policy are included. The aspect of product includes brand, product feature, product price, product package style, product quality, product classification, and product safety and hygiene; the aspect of consumer habit includes purchase purpose, source of information, promotion activity and purchase location. Finally, this study is of the opinion that governmental policies play a key role in the aspect of policy. Therefore, the aspect of policy has also been classified as the main dimension in this study, including the sub-principles such as promotion policies, quality certification by the government, the government¡¦s policies of imports and exports, traceability and so on. Through the analyses and retrievals of the questionnaires answered by the experts in the fields of production, official, and academia, related suggestions about marketing have been proposed, and provided as the reference for the supply and distribution units such as agriculture associations, fruit and vegetables cooperatives, and production-marketing groups and so on to select and set up related products and strategies. As a whole, this study has found out that as for the key factors that our countrymen choose domestic fruits, the most emphasized ones are: the aspect of product¡]0.406¡^¡Ö the aspect of consumer habit ¡]0.361¡^¡Ö the aspect of policy¡]0.233¡^. In other words, in terms of the aspect of policy (traceability, quality certification by the government, promotion policies, and the government¡¦s policies of imports and exports), consumers are less easily affected by the factor of the aspect of policy, aimed at the issue of the key indicator that our countrymen choose domestic fruits. In the perspective of related agriculture units, there is still room for improving the effort made according to our country¡¦s agriculture policies. In the future, the guiding principle for improvement needs be drawn up actively, aimed at the previous effort in the aspect of policy made by related agriculture units. In addition, in this study, related research suggestions have been proposed, aiming at the directions such as product safety and hygiene, brand strategies for domestic fruits, consumers¡¦ purchase behavior, package styles, and so on.

In the decade of 1990s, many traditional industries of Taiwan, especially those of labor intense type, began to transfer their production lines to off shore sites for their foreign direct investment. Many of them were following their customers¡¦ migrations to China, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries based on the need of upgrading their competence through supply chain integration and taking advantages of the abundance in human resource and lower labor cost in these countries. This study applies tanning industry A company as a model which became a multi-national corporate (MNC) by establishing its first tannery in Taiwan during the 1980s, building up its second factory in China in 1998 and then opening its third one in Vietnam for mass production in 2004. Concerning the environmental and water conservation issues, the three tanneries of A company utilize a production process using wet blue instead of salted hides that most tanneries use as raw material to make finished leather as products. In the past few years, the volatility in hide market price, over capacity in the tanning industry worldwide, and customer¡¦s bargaining power increase made a dramatic fall in the margins of tanning industry. Suffering from the low margins, A company is seeking the possibility of vertical integration in raw material supply by investing a beam house tannery with slated hide as raw material to make wet blue for its three tanneries producing finished leather. This study focused on the critical factors in the site selection decision making for A company¡¦s overseas wet blue tannery investment. In this study, the high level management members of A company and selected experts from other tanneries were interviewed with a pretest questionnaire and then an AHP questionnaire on the critical factors in site selection decision making for multinational tanning industry¡¦s overseas vertical integration investment. The answered AHP questionnaires were analyzed with software Expert Choice 2000 for Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP) analysis. The conclusions of this study based on the AHP analysis results include: 1. The critical factors in site selection decision making for multinational tanning industry¡¦s overseas vertical integration investment: the decisive elements in level two and level three of the AHP model as well as the ranking in priority of all decisive elements. 2. The suggested most favorable site for A company to invest a wet blue tannery for its vertival integration.

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In resent years, the competition between insurance companies in Taiwan has become more and more intense. The main reasons are not only the overall environmental issue such as financial management policies, but also the similarities of the services provided by the insurance companies that easily cause price-cutting competition. Moreover, with the economy crisis happened last year, the financial status of insurance industry has been seriously impacted. It¡¦s becoming harder and harder to run insurance businesses. In this highly competitive financial industry, what strategies should be used in order to strengthen a company¡¦s operation system, to increase efficiency and finally create a competitive advantage? Before deciding which strategy to use, the decision maker has to first understand the ¡§performance verifying index¡¨ of his company, the factors that affect company¡¦s performance, and then evaluate his company¡¦s advantage and disadvantage that it has over its competitors, and finally guide the company toward a correct path. It has been realized that past documents clearly lack a model that can provide suggestions to corporations how to face intensive competitions by using an evaluation method that can verify both financial and non-financial factors. Therefore, this research intends to use the ¡§total performance scorecard¡¨ theory to build a performance verifying index/system for insurance industry, and then develop a strategy guide. This research used ¡§analytic hierarchy process, AHP¡¨ questionnaire to conduct surveys on financial professionals, government officers and scholars, and then develop a hierarchy for the performance verifying index, and finally construct a performance management system for insurance industry. This research found out that when a insurance company is making a performance management strategy, ranking from the most important to least important aspects, they should consider financial aspect, customer aspect, learning/growing aspect and internal corporate flow path aspect. The ten most important indexes are gain per stock (0.099), cash usage net income rate (0.095), cash flow rate(0.076), customer value creation(0.063), retention expense ratio(0.062), employee professions (0.061), underwriting quality audit(0.06), customer return rate(0.059), customer satisfaction(0.055), and employee inspiration (0.052). These findings can be used as a reference when insurance companies are making performance-management decisions and strategies.

Lüneburg, University, Diss., 2002.

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 1987. / Thesis Advisor(s): Boger, Dan C. Second Reader: Andrus, Alvin F. "September 1987." Description based on title screen as viewed on April 23, 2010. DTIC Descriptor(s): Army Budgets, Decision Making, Goal Programming, Antimissile Defense Systems, Army Operations, Coefficients, Computer Programs, Hierarchies, Linearity, Management, Military Strategy, Mathematical Models, Operations Research, Personnel, Sensitivity, Theses, Army Research. DTIC Identifier(s): Army strategic defense command, Analytic hierarchy process. Author(s) subject terms: Goal Programming " Analytic Hierarchy Process, R&D Project Funding Models. Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-167). Also available in print.

abstract: Branding and brand management have been top management priorities in the hotel industry. Some researchers have concluded that strong branding would be an efficient way for hotels and hotel chains to differentiate themselves from each other. Recent studies have focused on the establishment of a brand equity model and the relevant causal relationships of the model. Most of these studies have used types of desirability scales examining the importance of individual factors in measuring brand equity. However, they ignore the trade-offs that affect and characterize choice. Particularly, the personal decision process implied by the hierarchical brand equity model is absent. This study proposed two alternative measures of brand equity, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and conjoint analysis (CA), to address these limitations. The AHP and the CA were compared using several validity measures to aid in selecting efficient methods. This study examined the validity of AHP and CA under two data collection methods applied to hotel branding: paper-based survey and online survey. Result showed that the AHP data collection methods were easier, as well as with respect to saving time and costs. Results also indicated that the AHP is equivalent to the CA with respect to predictive accuracy. Practical differences for hotel branding in attribute preferences were clearly observed between the AHP and the CA. The AHP results were consistent with previous studies by awarding high importance to perceived quality and brand loyalty and lower importance to brand awareness and brand image. Managerial implications were provided for results. In terms of practicality in data collection, the study results revealed that the data gathered online leads to a slightly lower internal and predictive validity. A limitation of this study was that the two methods were not perfectly comparable. Nevertheless, the validity of both AHP and CA seems satisfactory for both methods. The study results also offer useful perspectives to consider when choosing between the two methods, as well as between AHP and CA. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Community Resources and Development 2014

Every action a person takes is determined by the result of some decision. Making simple decisions is natural and does not require additional considerations. However, in case of multiple alternatives and criteria to be considered, decision-making technique is required. The most studied and developed technique is the Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP).This thesis is focused on the practical implementation of AHP. Firstly, it defines a set of features that are necessary for the decision-making process involving several experts and additional non-functional requirements to be met. Feature comparison has shown that none of the existing applications implements all required features. Therefore, a new application is designed. Further on, the engineering process is described, including transforming functional requirements into features, features into use cases, use cases into activities diagrams. After the developed application is described screens corresponding to each use case are presented. Non-functional requirements are portability, free availability, and usability. Compliance of the developed application with these criteria is checked with tests and two user experiments.The main results of this thesis are: (i) the extension of AHP theory with external consistency check to improve the quality of final results and (ii) the developed application which meets all requirements.

Die Verarbeitung von Datenströmen rückt zunehmend in den Fokus beim Aufbau moderner Big Data Infrastrukturen. Der Praxispartner dieser Master-Thesis, die integrationfactory GmbH & Co. KG, möchte zunehmend den Big Data Bereich ausbauen, um den Kunden auch in diesen Aspekten als Beratungshaus Unterstützung bieten zu können. Der Fokus wurde von Anfang an auf Apache Flink gelegt, einem aufstrebenden Stream-Processing-Framework. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Implementierung verschiedener typischer Anwendungsfälle des Unternehmens mithilfe von Flink und die anschließende Evaluierung dieser. Im Rahmen dessen wird am Anfang zunächst die zentrale Problemstellung festgehalten und daraus die Zielstellungen abgeleitet. Zum besseren Verständnis werden im Nachgang wichtige Grundbegriffe und Konzepte vermittelt. Es wird außerdem dem Framework ein eigenes Kapitel gewidmet, um den Leser einen umfangreichen aber dennoch kompakten Einblick in Flink zu geben. Dabei wurde auf verschiedene Quellen eingegangen, mitunter wurde auch ein direkter Kontakt mit aktiven Entwicklern des Frameworks aufgebaut. Dadurch konnten zunächst unklare Sachverhalte durch fehlende Informationen aus den Primärquellen im Nachgang geklärt und aufbereitet in das Kapitel hinzugefügt werden. Im Hauptteil der Arbeit wird eine Implementierung von definierten Anwendungsfällen vorgenommen. Dabei kommen die Datastream-API und FlinkSQL zum Einsatz, dessen Auswahl auch begründet wird. Die Ausführung der programmierten Jobs findet im firmeneigenen Big Data Labor statt, einer virtualisierten Umgebung zum Testen von Technologien. Als zentrales Problem dieser Master-Thesis sollen beide Schnittstellen auf die Eignung hinsichtlich der Anwendungsfälle evaluiert werden. Auf Basis des Wissens aus den Grundlagen-Kapiteln und der Erfahrungen aus der Entwicklung der Jobs werden Kriterien zur Bewertung mithilfe des Analytic Hierarchy Processes aufgestellt. Im Nachgang findet eine Auswertung statt und die Einordnung des Ergebnisses.:1. Einleitung 1.1. Motivation 1.2. Problemstellung 1.3. Zielsetzung 2. Grundlagen 2.1. Begriffsdefinitionen 2.1.1. Big Data 2.1.2. Bounded vs. unbounded Streams 2.1.3. Stream vs. Tabelle 2.2. Stateful Stream Processing 2.2.1. Historie 2.2.2. Anforderungen 2.2.3. Pattern-Arten 2.2.4. Funktionsweise zustandsbehafteter Datenstromverarbeitung 3. Apache Flink 3.1. Historie 3.2. Architektur 3.3. Zeitabhängige Verarbeitung 3.4. Datentypen und Serialisierung 3.5. State Management 3.6. Checkpoints und Recovery 3.7. Programmierschnittstellen 3.7.1. DataStream-API 3.7.2. FlinkSQL & Table-API 3.7.3. Integration mit Hive 3.8. Deployment und Betrieb 4. Implementierung 4.1. Entwicklungsumgebung 4.2. Serverumgebung 4.3. Konfiguration von Flink 4.4. Ausgangsdaten 4.5. Anwendungsfälle 4.6. Umsetzung in Flink-Jobs 4.6.1. DataStream-API 4.6.2. FlinkSQL 4.7. Betrachtung der Resultate 5. Evaluierung 5.1. Analytic Hierarchy Process 5.1.1. Ablauf und Methodik 5.1.2. Phase 1: Problemstellung 5.1.3. Phase 2: Struktur der Kriterien 5.1.4. Phase 3: Aufstellung der Vergleichsmatrizen 5.1.5. Phase 4: Bewertung der Alternativen 5.2. Auswertung des AHP 6. Fazit und Ausblick 6.1. Fazit 6.2. Ausblick