Evaluating R&D Projects as Investments by Using an Overall Ranking From Four New Fuzzy Similarity Measure-Based TOPSIS Variants

Abstract

Research and development (R&D) project ranking as investments is a well-known problem that is made difficult by incomplete and imprecise information about future project profitability. This paper shows how profitability results of R&D project evaluation with the fuzzy pay-off method can be ranked with four new variants of fuzzy TOPSIS each using a different fuzzy similarity measure. An overall project ranking that incorporates the four new variants' rankings with three different ideal solutions totaling 12 subrankings is presented. The implementation of the created methods is illustrated with a numerical example.