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

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.