Using evidential reasoning approach for ship turbine´s condition monitoring techniques ranking

Ranking and selection of optimal alternative among a range of alternatives have always been a multifaceted task in real-world complex decision analysis problems due to the qualitative nature of the decision criteria´s and also information uncertainties like incomplete i.e. missing or imprecise data. This makes ranking process a difficult task in all multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problems. Evidential reasoning approach advocates a general multi level evaluation process for dealing with MCDM problems. This paper reports the application of evidential reasoning approach to ranking and optimal selection among three techniques utilized for monitoring the condition of a turbine on a transportation ship. The problem was attempted earlier in the literature by different fuzzy MCDM methods. However, the assessment of incomplete information was not at all accounted earlier, which is incorporated in this paper. This paper demonstrates how the evidential reasoning approach could be used as another additional tool to deal with problem of ranking of condition monitoring techniques.