Selecting scenarios for production equipment with group decision-making approach: a case study

Mathematical methods in operations research (OR) have become an appropriate tool for various decision-making and managerial fields; further, the models and methods proposed in various branches of OR have accomplished providing applicable helps for managers and organization. The present paper is aimed to investigate a problem in an industrial plant. The problem was defined such that a factory pertaining to the glass container manufacturing industries was faced with various scenarios for renovating its production equipment. In this regard, the group decision-making approach was used, in which opinions of the senior manager as well as opinions of the industrial engineering and R D department were taken into account. First, different scenarios and options as well as evaluation criteria were identified; then, the scenarios and evaluation criteria with more importance were selected and finalized. Subsequently, AHP (analytic hierarchy process) was used for ranking the scenarios with group decision-making approach; for this purpose, the Expert-Choice software was also used.