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The recognition of membership function by knowledge acquisition from experts is an important factor for many fuzzy mathematical programming models. Meanwhile, hesitant fuzzy set theory as a known and popular modern fuzzy set by assigning some discrete membership degrees under a set could appropriately deal with imprecise information in decision-making problems. Thus, the Hesitant Fuzzy Membership Function (HFMF) estimation could help users of the mathematical programming approaches to provide a powerful solution in continuous space problems. Therefore, this study proposes a possibilistic programming approach based on Bezier curve mechanism for estimating the HFMF. In the process of possibilistic programming approach, an optimization model is presented to tune the primary parameters of Bezier curve by the goal of minimizing the SSE) between the empirical data and fitted HFMF. After that, the efficiency and applicability of the proposed approach is checked by proposing a novel mathematical model for biomass supply chain network design problem. Finally, a computational experiment and validation procedure about the biomass supply chain network design is provided to peruse the verification and validation of the proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accidents involving falls and falling objects (group I) are highly frequent accidents in the construction industry. While being hit by a vehicle, electric shock, collapse in the excavation and fire or explosion accidents (group II) are much less frequent, they make up a considerable proportion of severe accidents. In this study, multiple-correspondence analysis, decision tree, ensembles of decision tree and association rules methods are employed to analyse a database of construction accidents throughout Iran between 2007 and 2011. The findings indicate that in group I, there is a significant correspondence among these variables: time of accident, place of accident, body part affected, final consequence of accident and lost workdays. Moreover, the frequency of accidents in the night shift is less than others, and the frequency of injury to the head, back, spine and limbs are more. In group II, the variables time of accident and body part affected are mostly related and the frequency of accidents among married and older workers is more than single and young workers. There was a higher frequency in the evening, night shifts and weekends. The results of this study are totally in line with the previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A fuzzy rule-based expert system is developed for evaluating intellectual capital. A fuzzy linguistic approach assists managers to understand and evaluate the level of each intellectual capital item. The proposed fuzzy rule-based expert system applies fuzzy linguistic variables to express the level of qualitative evaluation and criteria of experts. Feasibility of the proposed model is demonstrated by the result of intellectual capital performance evaluation for a sample company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]