A novel approach for sensitivity analysis in linear programs with trapezoidal fuzzy numbers.

There are several methods in the literature to deal with the sensitivity analysis of fuzzy linear programming (FLP) problems. In this paper, the shortcomings of some existing methods are pointed out and to overcome these shortcomings, a new method is proposed to handle the sensitivity analysis of that kind of FLP problems in which the elements of the coefficient matrix of the constraints are represented by real numbers, and the remaining parameters are represented by symmetric trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. To the best of our knowledge, till now there is no method in the literature to deal with the sensitivity analysis of such FLP problems without converting them to the crisp linear programming problems. The advantages of the proposed method over existing methods are discussed. To illustrate the approach a numerical example is examined by using the proposed method and the obtained results are discussed. The method is easy to understand and to apply for dealing with the sensitivity analysis of the same problems occurring in real life situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]