Ilker Topcu

Istanbul Technical University · Department of Industrial Engineering

Scheduling of crude oil operations is one of the most critical and challenging problems in petroleum refineries. Crude oil operations have more impact on the profitability of the whole refinery as these operations are the first steps of refinery operations. Crude oil operations scheduling is a complex problem as many complicated relationships and m...

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive literature review of the research and development (R) project selection problem since 1977, using the PRISMA method. This study aims (i) to support researchers and practitioners to understand selection methodologies, decision-maker types, and perspectives; (ii) to guide them in choosing the mo...

Kapıkule border crossing, connecting Turkey to Bulgaria, is one of the largest customs gates at Europe via road transportation. Although it has a high capacity and large land area, there occurs long delays in the custom services due to inefficient operations resulting with long queues of trucks and long service times. To overcome this problem, in t...

Data and its processed state 'information' have become an indispensable resource for virtually all aspects of business, education, etc. Consequently, decisions regarding the handling of this data, transforming it into meaningful information, and ultimately arriving at the best course of action have taken on a new importance. This book highlights a...

Academic conferences are popular platforms for academicians to share their research with colleagues, get feedback, and stay up to date on recent academic studies. Conferences also provide opportunities for the participants to express themselves, expand their network, and become socialized. However, academicians are forced to choose a limited number...

An occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS) is a set of people, resources, and policies interacting in an organized way to reduce damage and losses generated in the workplace. Although there are various OHSMSs in the shipping industry, the International Safety Management (ISM) Code which is managed by the International Maritime Orga...

Purpose-In the automotive industry, the high process complexity becomes an important issue because of the increased number of product and process variants demanded by the customers. To avoid quality defects in assembly and losses in such a complex manufacturing environment, new predictive support systems are required. This study aims to develop a m...

After the 25th International Conference on Multiple-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM 2019) in Istanbul, one of the most successful MCDM conferences to date, authors that presented their works were invited to submit these studies to the special topic section of IJAHP.

Kapıkule Border Crossing, the second busiest land border crossing point in the world and the busiest in Europe, has become inadequate to process the increasing number of trucks transporting goods between Europe and Turkey. To address this issue, in a previous study, a detailed process analysis was conducted, a simulation model was developed, and se...

Purpose – Fierce competition in the airline industry compels airline companies to offer various services. Yet, while companies strive to become preferable, customers confront numerous airline selection indicators, and as such causes vagueness in human thinking that needs to be systematically and normatively resolved. Accordingly, the purpose of thi...

Less than two months to go! You are all welcome to the 25th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM 2019) that will take place at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey from June 16th to June 21st, 2019.

CDF has offered to support a limited number of grants for students, Ph. D. candidates, post-docs, or young researchers who have worked in AHP/ANP to help them attend the MCDM 2019 conference by awarding a grant that will cover their conference fee.

The preparations for the 25th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM 2019) are going on. This time it will take place at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey from June 16th to June 21st, 2019. It would be the second conference that will be held in Turkey; the first one was the 15th International Conference wh...

In this paper we address the hub location problem in which capacity restrictions are introduced into the objective function as a penalty cost to represent their congestion effects on respective hubs. The goal of hub location problems is to locate an optimal set of hubs while minimizing sum of the transportation and opening costs under various const...

Electricity is the rising force among worldwide end-uses of energy. To meet the increasing demand, accurate policy decisions should be made considering each country’s own dynamics. In fact, the selection of appropriate electricity generation resources necessitates the consideration of different aspects of the problem; hence, multi-attribute evaluat...

Academic conferences are preferable platforms for academicians to share their research with colleagues, get feedback for improving their research and stay up to date on recent academic studies. Besides the contributions to academic research, these conferences also provide opportunities for the participants to improve their qualifications, expand th...

Deniz taşımacılığının sürekliliğinde odak unsur olan gemi filolarının emniyet ve performans parametrelerinin hassas bir şekilde takip edilmesi gerekmektedir. Bunun beraberinde, denizcilikte çevre, emniyet ve insan sağlığı ile ilgili konularda uluslararası kural yaptırımları da giderek yoğunlaşmaktadır. Bu konudaki en güncel uluslararası kurallardan...

Banks need to open new branches in new sites as a result of increase in the population, individual earnings and the growth in national economy. In this respect, opening new branches or reorganizing the locations of current branches is an important decision problem for banks to accomplish their strategic objectives. This paper presents a decision su...

Credit rating is a process for building a classification system for credit lenders to characterize current or potential credit borrowers. By such a process, financial institutions classify borrowers for lending decision by evaluating their financial and/or nonfinancial performances. Recently, use of social media data has emerged an important source...

Due to product variety and modeling structure, the automotive manufacturing process requires state-of-the art production methods that cause a high complexity level in operations which assembly operators work in a mixed-assembly environment. To maintain a competitive advantage, companies should take a different approach that considers the methodolog...

This book offers a comprehensive reference guide to operations research theory and applications in health care systems. It provides readers with all the necessary tools for solving health care problems. The respective chapters, written by prominent researchers, explain a wealth of both basic and advanced concepts of operations research for the mana...

Operations Research has received considerable interest in recent years in the field of Healthcare Management Sciences. A wide variety of Operations Research techniques have been proposed in the literature. In this chapter, a taxonomy of Operations Research Methodology in Healthcare Management is presented in an attempt to provide a common terminolo...

n this study, logistics process improvement of Kapikule Border Crossing, one of the largest customs gates, has been evaluated. It is obvious that, any decrease in trade time is expected to realize positive impact on the logistics competitiveness of a specific country. In order to reduce time across all dimensions of the border process, the improvem...

Automated external defibrillators (AED) offered a new perspective on resuscitation by enabling first-responders to deliver life-saving defibrillation within the critical first minutes after sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). This raised the question about where to place the AEDs. This study aims to provide a novel approach to the problem and to serve as...

Credit lenders utilize credit rating approaches to provide a classification system for characterizing credit borrowers. In order to measure the borrowers’ credibility, that is, ability and willingness to repay the debt, there are many financial and non-financial criteria that should be considered. The basic aim of this study is to propose a multipl...

Multi-faceted characteristics of urban travel have an impact on the passengers' overall satisfaction with the transport system. In this study, we investigate the interrelationships among traveler satisfaction, travel and traveler characteristics, and service performance in a multimodal network that comprises of a trunk line and its feeder lines. We...

In this study, the scheduling of truck load operations in automated storage and retrieval systems is investigated. The problem is an extension of previous ones such that a pallet can be retrieved from a set of alternative aisles. It is modelled as a flexible job shop scheduling problem where the loads are considered as jobs, the pallets of a load a...

This study offers a model which is able not only to measure the success of sponsorship but also fill the gap of a guide for the decision makers who are about to make sponsorship agreement. It investigates the jersey sponsors of football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball of three major sports clubs in Turkey. Two separate surveys were conduc...

In this study, a genetic algorithm (GA) with priority-based representation is proposed for a exible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) which is one of the hardest operations research problems. Investigating the effect of the proposed representation schema on FJSP is the main contribution to the literature. The priority of each operation is represen...

This paper presents an integrated decision support methodology for locating bank branches. The methodology is composed of two stages: Problem structuring, and modeling. In the first stage, initially, a number of criteria are selected with the help of a detailed literature review and expert opinions. Subsequently, importance weights of these criteri...

In recent years, technology has improved and distribution channels such as credit cards, telephone-internet banking, Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) etc. have become alternative opportunities for reaching services of banks. However, banks generally gain new customers and develop customers’ loyalty at their branches. Since branches are the indispen...

People who wish to travel or participate in a touristic activity often do not have certain information about available travel destinations, group tours, and touristic events. Furthermore, they have their own personal expectations and preferences, especially regarding time and budget limitations. Therefore, they do not want to spend their limited ti...

Customer order prioritization is a very critical and crucial issue for the manufacturing companies as far as their limited capacities are concerned. When the current awarded projects start to cover large portions of the company's design and manufacturing capacities, the company confronts with the decision problem of choosing which customer order ne...

Innovation is a crucial tool for the firms to compete; thus defining the factors, which affect this process, is necessary to give a quick response to the changes. Therefore, finding a suitable innovation strategy is a vital problem for companies. When the relationships among the innovation strategy selection factors are considered, the innovation s...

This chapter aims at developing a taxonomic framework to classify the studies on the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP). The FJSP is a generalization of the classical job shop scheduling problem (JSP), which is one of the oldest NP-hard problems. Although various solution methodologies have been developed to obtain good solutions in reason...

Based on the problems of the current tools, this article introduces an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based approach which aims to assess architectural design quality within the design process from the perspectives of stakeholders’ preferences, departing from a conception of architectural design quality which is in the eye of the beholder. This a...

Although technology has improved and distribution channels such as credit cards, mobile-internet banking, operation centers, automated teller machines, point of sales etc. have become alternative opportunities for reaching bank services, the branch offices are still important for the banks to gain new customers and keep in touch with them. Therefor...

In today’s business environment, companies should make strategic decisions to gain sustainable competitive advantage. Order selection is a crucial issue among these decisions especially for steel production industry. When the companies allocate a high proportion of their design and production capacities to their ongoing projects, determining which...

The choice of flag is one of the main strategic/critical decisions for shipowners in the initial stage of maritime enterprises. On the other hand, flagging out has a great influence on the prestige and economic benefits for traditional maritime countries. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach...

This study aims to provide a decision support model to improve the quality of service at an airport terminal. For this purpose, a model based on fuzzy cognitive mapping is utilized. The fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) method allows dynamic modeling of problems by considering the complex network structure of the model; that is, the effects of factors...

Reverse logistics (RL) is recently receiving much attention because of growing environmental problems. Reusing, recycling and remanufacturing are considered as environmentally and financially effective processes for various drivers - government, corporations and customers. Because many parameters have to be defined by decision makers based on their...

Purpose - Motivated by a lack of studies in graduate level supply chain education, this research aims to explore trends in supply chain-related graduate programmes in Europe and to propose a framework for designing such programmes. Design/methodology/approach - The authors determine "knowledge" and "skills" areas applicable to supply chain manageme...

The goals of this study are to test a pattern of ethical decision making that predicts ethical intentions of individuals within corporations based primarily on the ethical values embedded in corporate culture, and to see whether that model is generally stable across countries. The survey instrument used scales to measure the effects of corporate et...

Recently, compliance and regulation has been number one threat; not only for the area of financial services, but also across a spectrum of sectors, ranging from oil and gas, through life sciences and technology to automotive. The main reason for the tougher stand against corrupt business practices is the increased enforcement actions against compan...

In order to increase the patronage of urban transit systems, improvement of customer satisfaction is a key element. As the factors affecting urban transit ridership are several, conflicting, and incommensurable; a multi criteria decision modeling technique is needed for the analysis of these factors. Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) is a decision-supp...

Consumption and shopping patterns are subject to changes for a variety of product categories. Shopping malls are becoming new places that consumers visit where the shopping itself has changed meaning and focus. Retailers are now concerned to find ways of presenting themselves inside these modern buildings and adapt to rapidly changing consumer expe...

Architectural design can be considered as a process influenced by many stakeholders, each of which has different decision power. Each stakeholder might have his/her own criteria and weightings depending on his/her own perspective and role. Hence design can be seen as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) process. Considering architectural design,...

In telecommunication industry, for many organizations, it is really important to take place in the market. As competition increases between companies, customer churn becomes a great issue to deal with by the telecommunication providers. For an effective churn management, companies try to retain their existing customers, instead of acquiring new one...

Local conditions have important effects on strategy-making processes in natural resources management and also in forestry. From this viewpoint, the aim of the paper is to investigate how the strategic priorities differ among local forestry services. Thus, the research was conducted on a regional forest directorate as a sample case that has seven fo...

Architectural design can be considered as a process influenced by many stakeholders, each of which has different decision power. Each stakeholder might have his/her own criteria and weightings depending on his/her own perspective and role. Hence design can be seen as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) process. Considering architectural design,...

Traffic congestion in major cities is one of the main problems of modern life. To eliminate this problem or at least to minimize the effects of it, more attention should be given to efficient public transport but selecting an appropriate mass transit system has several conflicting criteria. This study aims a multi criteria decision making recommend...

The purpose of this study is to compare the performances of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Multinomial Probit (MNP) approaches in modeling the choice decision within fast moving consumer goods sector. To do this, based on 2597 toothpaste purchases of a panel sample of 404 households, choice models are built and their performances are compared...

As the service industries grow, tasks are not directly assigned to the skills but the knowledge of the worker which is to be valued more in finding the best match. The problem becomes difficult mainly because the match has to be seen with the objectives of both sides. Assignment methods fail to respond to a multi-objective, multi-constraint problem...

Choice of an adequate material in design process is one of the critical tasks for the relevant decision-makers. At this insight, the consistency of the decisions is extremely depending on the relevance of adapted techniques to the nature of different problem cases. This paper proposed an integrated decision aid (IDEA) to match the suitable techniqu...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to determine the relative importance of the usability and functionality factors for online auction and shopping web sites from the perspective of young consumers. Design/methodology/approach – The Analytical Network Process (ANP) was used to analyse the relative importance of the usability and functionality fa...

This study presents a comparative investigation of ethical perceptions of the faculty members, working in selected departments of Turkish universities. A descriptive research design is used in order to reveal the perceptions regarding the ethical dilemmas related to instruction, research, and outside employment activities in both 2003 and 2008. The...

A multiple criteria framework has been developed to prioritize the measures of success and the antecedents for Turkish small to medium sized manufacturing enterprises. Analytical network process (ANP) has been used to construct the framework because of the dependency among measures of success and the antecedents. Methodology requires expert judgmen...

This research is based on quantifying adoption of Internet Banking by using an integrated multi-criteria decision aid approach. The analytic network process model, supported by a Delphi-type group-decision-making procedure, is used to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the challenges to adoption of the Internet Banking by Turkish customers. This...

Equipments and systems on board ship, although well designed, will not remain safe or reliable if they are not maintained. The general objective of the maintenance process is to make use of the knowledge of failures and accidents to achieve the maximum possible safety with the lowest possible cost. In this insight, this study proposes a risk-assess...

This study compares the ethical decision-making processes of Turkish, Thai, and American businesspeople, considering perceived moral intensity (PMI), corporate ethical values (CEV), and perceived importance of ethics (PIE). PMI describes the ethical decision making at the individual level, CEV assesses the influences of the organization’s ethical c...

The need for analytical solutions towards various managerial processes in shipping business has been clearly seen in maritime society. To remedy this gap, the execution of relevant processes can be supported via multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. This article applied an Integrated Decision Aid (IDEA) to overcome the model selectio...

While maritime pollution is often caused at the operational level, the causes can generally be traced back to shortcomings in the ship–shore interface and to poor communication among stakeholders. Here, the environmental responsibilities of maritime stakeholders are systematically analyzed and quantified using an analytic network process. This appr...

International ship and port facility security (ISPS) Codewas developed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as an execution framework to ensure high level of security measures applicable to ships and port facilities. Besides contributions of ISPS Code towards security improvement, additional bureaucracy (i.e. documentation, certificatio...

The aim of this chapter is to explore methodological transparency as a viable solution to problems created by existing aggregated indices as well as to conduct a detailed analysis on the ongoing performance of nations’ competitiveness. For this purpose, a methodology composed of three steps is used. To start with, a combined clustering analysis met...

Human resources management (HRM) have been increased its functionality and popularity in the shipping business, due to the expeditiously changes in technology, market strategies, risks and challenges in transportation industry. Despite the requirements of International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarer...

As systems become more complex, decision support systems require an evolution. The integration of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with the geographical information systems (GIS) combines decision support methodology with powerful visualization, mapping and analyzing capabilities which should considerably facilitate i.e. creation of the suitabili...

The airline crew pairing problem (CPP) is one of the classical problems in airline operations research due to its crucial impact on the cost structure of an airline. Moreover, the complex crew regulations and the large scale of the resulting mathematical programming models have rendered it an academically interesting problem over decades. The CPP i...

The capability of firms to survive and to have a competitive advantage in global markets depends on, amongst other things, the efficiency of public institutions, the excellence of educational, health and communications infrastructures, as well as on the political and economic stability of their home country. The measurement of competitiveness and s...